LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ^ 

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i UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



LIFE QUESTIONS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



CHRISTIANITY THE SCIENCE OF MANHOOD. i2mo. $1.50. 
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LIGHT ON THE CLOUD. i8mo. $1.25. 
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Life Questions 



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BY 

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M. J. SAVAGE. 



y^^9S OF r , 
7vr 70^2. /t' 





BOSTON: 

LOCKWOOD, BROOKS & COMPANY. 

1879. 



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Copyright, 1879, 
By LOCKWOOD, BROOKS & CO. 



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TO 

MY MOST MERCILESS CRITIC- 

MY MOST CAREFUL ADVISE R- 

MY BEST INSPIRATION — 

MY WIFE. 



PREFACE. 



Not of my own motive, but at the request of those 
who first heard them, these seven Sunday morning 
addresses are now given to the public in book form. 
No special claim is set up on their behalf. They 
are only a piece cut off the web of ordinary work. 
With one exception they were spoken, not written ; 
and they are now reprinted from stenographic 
reports. 

Believing in the truth of what I try to utter, I 

am glad to reach as large an audience as possible. 

This is my only apology. 

M. J. S. 
Boston, April, 1879. 



CONTENTS 



J'irst ^lustiatt. 



WHAT HAVE I A RIGHT TO EXPECT THE WORLD TO DO 
FOR ME ? 

PAGE 

That the World wrongs us, i 

Some Effects of this Belief, 4 

The Conditions of Life, 6 

How the World looks on a New-comer, . . 8 

The inexorable Law, 10 

Lllustrations, 11 

Shall we blame the World "i 15 

The World a Market, . . . . . . 16 

->£ Causes of Suffering, . . . . . . ' 1 7 

The Question answered, . . . . . 21 

WHAT IS THE RELATION OF THE BODY TO THE MIND AND 
SOUL ? 

What is Man? 25 

Abstract Theories, ....... 26 

What do we k?iow about it? . . . . .28 

f^he Power of the Body over the Mind, . . 32 

Lnfluence of the Body on Morals and Religion, . 35 



X Contents. 



PAGE 



'J^he Duty of Physical Development., . . . 37 

'^'Practical Applications^ 38 

-^ood, . 39 

Sleepy . . . . . . . . .41 

>^ork, ' 42 

yiMcfiial InJlammatio7t, . . . . . -44 



WHAT IS GOOD SOCIETY AND HOW AM I RELATED TO IT 



Two Meanings of Society, 46 

Ideas around which Society has Crystallized, . . 47 

What is good Society ? 52 

The Law of social Success, . . ' . .54 

Give and Take, . . . . . . . 55 

Doers and Grumblers, . . . . . -57 

A Charity Principle, . . . . . . 58 

Limits of Acquaintance, 58 

Social Obligations, . . . . . . 61 

Your Contribution, ....... 64 

Men and Women, . . . . . . . 65 

Women and Men, . . ~ 68 



HOW MUCH MUST I WORK, AND HOW MUCH MAY I 
PLAY ? 

^Working and Playing, . • 71 

itMan's Nature, • . . .72 

ji^abor and Growth, 74 



jCo7ite7its. xi 



PAGE 



y^(Work and Civilization^ 75 

XWork and Duty, 76 

~^^(JIow much Labor ? 78 

^^lay in Nature, . . ... . . . 80 

fCFtay in Man, 81 

\^Play and Purita7iism, . . . . . . 82 

'tTJic underlying Principle, 85 

■How much Play ? 86 

^^AVork as Dissipation, . . . . . '87 

yrPerversions, . . . . . . . . 89 

y^ Excess, . . . . . . . . • 91 

WHAT IS THE TRUE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL 
CULTURE ? 

What is Life? 94 

Life a Problem, 96 

Engine and Compass, . . . . . . 97 

Meaning of Culture, . . . . . . -99 

Bread-winning Problem, loi 

Moral Problems, . . . . . . .102 

Religious Problems, . . . . . ,103 

Social Problems, . . . . . . .105 

Political Problems, . . . . » .106 

Lntelligence settles them, 107 

Books and Memory, . . . . . .107 

Are Books practical! . . . . . .109 

What to read, . . . . . . .110 



xii ContentSx 

PAGE 

Idealizing the Real, . . . . . . . 1 1 1 

Time to read, . . . . . . .112 

Mental Atinosphere, 114 

The Society of Books, 115 

Books broaden Men, 117 

Books as Recreation, . . . . . . .118 



•btl^ @u^sti0iT« 



SHALL I TRY TO BE RICH i 



■ Youth and Dreams, 
An earthly Paradise, 
The Dream of Home, 
The Dream of Position, 
The Political Dream, 
The Dream of Travel, 
Gold " the Stuff that Dreams are made of,'' 
Wealth a good Thing, 
Evils of Poverty, . 
Wealth sometimes too dear. 
End higher than Means, 
Honesty better than Money, 
Home better than Money, 
Culture better than Money, 
A Man, or three Dollars, 
Doing Good as you go. 
Get Money, but — , 
Rank of Money-makers, 



119 
120 
121 
122 
123 
124 

125 
126 
127 
127 
128 
129 

131 
132 

135 
135 
136 



Contents. xiii 

HOW HIGH IS THE RANK OF LOVE? 



PAGE 



All saved if Love not lost, 138 

The World-voyage, 139 

All for Love, 140 

The Bird's Nest, . . . . . . .141 

Love in Literature, . . . . . .143 

Love in Life, 147 

Sentiment and Sentimentality, . . . .147 

High Water Mark of a World, . . . .149 

Love and Patriotism, . . . . . .151 

Love and Morals, 153 

Love and Religion, 154 

Love and Law, 155 

Love and Retrospect, . . . , . . 156 
Love and Prospect, 157 



LIFE QUESTIONS, 



WHAT HAVE I A RIGHT TO EXPECT THE WORLD TO 
DO FOR ME? 



T/iat the World wrongs us. 

In Music Hall not long ago, speaking of the 
world and of the difficulties which men and women 
meet in trying to get through it creditably or suc- 
cessfully, a prominent lecturer said, in his half 
humorous way, " This is not a very good world for 
men and women, anyhow. Three-quarters of it are 
water, and it is a good deal better place for the 
development of fishes than it is for men." This 
simply voices, in a certain way, a sentiment very 
often expressed, and that has been expressed from 
the beginning even until to-day, and that the world 
has by no means heard the last of yet. I wish to 
read to you, as illustrating another phase of it, two 
or three lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem : 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



Good-by, proud world ! I 'm going home. 

Thou art not my friend, and I 'm not thine. 
Long through thy weary crowds I roam — 

A river-ark on the ocean brine. 
Long I 've been tossed like the driven foam ; 
But now, proud world, I 'm going home. 

Good-by to Flattery's fawning face ; 

To Grandeur, with his wise grimace ; 

To upstart Wealth's averted eye ; 

To supple office, low and high ; 

To crowded halls, to court and street ; 

To frozen hearts and hasting feet ; 

To those who go, and those who come ; 

Good-by, proud world ! I 'm going home. 

Thus Mr. Emerson refers not to going home in the 
sense of leaving the world, as I take it from the rest 
of the poem, but to deserting the busy life of men 
and going to his home in the country, retiring to him- 
self, to his more private life. This general complaint 
against the world, as though in some sort of fashion 
it owed us what it does not render, is the point I have 
in mind, and which I wish to force on your attention. 
You can trace this same thought away back to the 
very dawn of the world. It is this which gave its 
inspiration and which gives its permanent life and 
interest to the book of Job — this question as to why 
the world should treat a man as Job was treated. 
And as you come down the ages you find it the theme 
of poet and orator and of common conversation in 
every-day life. This was the central purpose and 



THE WORLD. 



point of the great epic of Milton. His purpose, he 
said, was to " reconcile the ways of God to man." 
That is, to explain the justice of the way in which 
the world treats people. That is what it means, I 
take it, when translated into common speech. And 
all of us, I suppose, as we grow older, have more or 
less of this feeling of being out with the world, of 
being dissatisfied with it ; of feeling that somehow or 
other it has fallen short of our just expectation ; that 
it has not given us all that we deserve ; that it has 
not paid us all it owes ; that it has not furnished the 
amount of peace, or pleasure, or power, that some- 
how or other we are entitled to. The young man, as 
he gets along in life, begins to lose the glow and 
beauty and force of the ideal that inspired him. As 
Mr. Julian Hawthorn has lately sung it in a beautiful 
poem in the London Spectator: 

Fails boyhood's hope ere long, 
For the deed still mocks the plan. 

Men and women all about us feel that somehow 
the world has wronged them. They, perhaps, are 
ugly, when they wish they might have been beautiful. 
Somehow they are out with the world because they 
are not finer-looking or more attractive. Here is a 
man who thinks he can write a poem, and the world 
does not agree with him ; and he is out with the 
world because its judgment does not coincide with 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



his own. Here is a man who thinks he ought to be 
richer than he is to-day for all the effort he has put 
forth ; that he ought to be able to own a finer house 
and live on a better street; but the world has not 
given him the power to carry out his wishes, and so 
he is dissatisfied, disgruntled, as we say, with the 
world. Here is another man who thinks that he 
ought to occupy a higher social position than his 
fellow-men, neighbors and friends concede to him, 
and he feels that somehow the world has wronged 
him. There is another man who feels that after all 
the service he has rendered his party or his country 
he deserves an office that somebody else gets, and 
that he must go without, and he feels that the world 
has wronged him. And so in every direction — you 
will fill up the picture for yourselves • — men feel that 
the world ought to have done something for them that 
it has not done ; that they ought to have gotten out 
of the world something they have failed to obtain. 

Some Effects of this Belief. 

The results of this are sometimes exceedingly 
disastrous and unfortunate. We find one man, 
such as I alluded to a moment ago, who simply loses 
the power of his ideal ; who started out full of 
hope, courage, cheer, believing that the world had 
grand things for him, and that he might achieve 



THE WORLD. 



5 



great results ; but at last he sits down, discouraged, 
disheartened, content to^ crawl through the world 
any way he can. Another man by this process is not 
simply discouraged ; he is soured, embittered, turned 
into an enemy and fault-finder against the world, 
continually fretting, day after day, at its inhabitants 
and its woes. Another still, in some countries, is 
turned into a bandit, a robber. He says : " The 
world is not my friend, and I am not its friend. I 
will get out of it everything I can." In other 
countries, where banditti are not very popular or very 
safe, a man may turn precisely the same force of 
disgust with the world into a selfish seeking for 
gain. In business, or in social life, without any 
regard to the rights or interests of others, he 
makes himself a selfish man, fighting the world as 
though it were his enemy, and determined to get out 
of it, its confusion, its necessities, all that he can, and 
let it go its own way, as it will. Another man is 
turned into a misanthrope, like Byron, who vents his 
spleen through beautiful verses or some other me- 
dium ; holding himself up before the world in the 
role of a martyr, asking men's pity and compassion, 
that a man so wonderfully endowed, so beautiful, so 
fine, so nobly furnished as he, should not be any 
better appreciated. Another, perhaps, carries this 
disgust so far as to reach the brink of suicide itself, 
from which he plunges into the abyss ; so tired of 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



life, so disgusted with the society of the world that he 
leaves it and will have no more to do with it. These 
represent the different phases of the attitude of mind 
into which men are apt to come, growing out of this 
demand which they make upon the world, but which 
the world does not satisfy. 

The Co7tditions of Life. 

I propose, then, to raise and answer this ques- 
tion if I can : How much have I a right to claim 
of the world, to demand that it shall do for me ? 
Let us look at the conditions a moment. Stand 
by the cradle of a new-born child. The child is 
what it is by virtue of what } Not by virtue of 
that which any man, woman or child on the face 
of the earth has done, except its immediate parents 
and friends and the long line of its ancestry. The 
child may be beautiful, so fair that as it grows 
up it shall become a queen in society and find the 
world in admiration at her feet. The child may be 
so plain that it shall never win an admirer and go 
through the world sad and alone. The child may 
have a brain power that shall fit him to be a king of 
men, a political leader, an orator, a poet, a master 
mind in the business concerns of the world; or it 
may be, so enfeebled in brain and mental activity 
and power that it shall hardly be able to gain for 



THE WORLD. 



7 



itself standing room in the great crowded market of 
the world ; pressed by others into a corner, fed on the 
crusts and crumbs that are the leavings of the world's 
rich tables, or peremptorily thrust out into the dark- 
ness from which it came. It may be a poet or it may 
be an idiot. It starts with certain qualities, certain 
faculties, certain endowments it has received, I say, 
from the long line of its ancestry reaching back no 
one knows how far into the darkness and infinity of 
its past. Now who is to blame for the faculties and 
powers with which this child enters upon life } You 
may blame God if you will, though you have no 
recourse. There is no higher court of appeal to 
which we can carry a case like this. You may say it 
is not right ; but, if you will think for a moment, the 
only practical definition of right that we can frame 
includes the idea that there is some person who is 
responsible and to whom we can appeal to make 
good our claim. There is no right or wrong in the 
matter so far as such a definition as that is con- 
cerned. We stand helpless before a fact. We may 
blame the parents or the ancestors ; it may be a fault 
or a folly, a sin or a misfortune of one or many of 
this long line of ancestry that is responsible for the 
condition of the child when it starts its life course. 
But at any rate we cannot help it now. The child is 
here and is what it is. The point I wish to impress 
upon you lies in this question : Is the world to blame 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



for it ? What do we mean by the world in a question 
like that ? We do not mean the general system of 
the universe, or the soil, the climate, the sun, the 
stars, the influences of wind and rain. We talk 
about being out with the world and the world not 
rendering us its due ; what we practically mean is the 
men and women that make up the inhabitants of the 
world at the present time — the time of which we are 
speaking. Now are these men and women to blame .'* 
Are they to be praised because this* new-born child is 
a genius ; are they to be blamed because it is in- 
capable? The world has nothing whatever to do 
with it. Lodge our fault-finding where we will we 
have no right to say the world is at fault. The 
world has had nothing to do with it. 

How the World looks upon a New Comer. 

How then shall the world look upon this new-born 
child that is just entering upon its stage.-* The world 
is pretty full. All the offices are filled and there are 
ten thousand applicants for every vacancy; all the 
high positions of responsibility and trust are filled, 
and there are thousands of people waiting for one 
here and one there to fall out and give them a place 
in the higher rank. The world's land is very largely 
occupied ; it is all owned and there are thousands of 
people who would like to own land for whom there is 



THE WORLD. 



no land to own. All the world is in the possession of 
people before this child arrives. Does the coming, 
then, of this child confer any benefit upon the world 
so that it stands in the relation of obligation towards 
the child .'' It seems to me rather that it is some- 
thing like a party at a feast; \%hen a new comer 
arrives it is only another chair, another mouth to fill, 
a subdivision of the supplies; and if the company 
fills the table and they are agreeably related to each 
other we cannot feel that they are under any special 
obligation to the new comer. Here, then, it seems 
to me is the attitude in which we ought to stand 
toward this question. The new comer arrives in the 
world filled with men and women occupying all the 
places, enjoying so far as they can all the good and 
sweets and amusements of life, and doing so far as 
they can all the work. Now, then, by what process 
— here is the question — by what process shall the 
new comer establish a claim to the good things of 
the world .^ By what right shall he say I ought to 
have some of this money, I ought to have some of 
this land, I ought to have one of these offices, I ought 
to fill one of these high social positions, men ought 
to bow down to my genius and recognize my right 
and my power.? Through what process, I say, shall 
the new comer in the world establish his claim to any 
such recognition as this ? The principle is embod- 
ied, it seems to me, perfectly and crisply in those old 



10 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



words of Paul. The only way by which a child can 
establish his claim for bread is by the process of 
labor. " If any man will not work neither shall he 
eat." Of course from the inexorable working of this 
law I have mentally excepted the obligation which the 
father and mother ^o we to the child. They, who have 
been responsible for bringing the child into the world, 
owe to it everything which they possess and which 
they can possibly do in developing the child and 
fitting it for the part it is to play in the world ; but 
outside of father and mother, outside of this intimate 
home circle, where comes in the obligation .-* And 
here it seems to me we must face 

The Inexorable Law — 

" If any man will not work neither shall he eat." 
The principle runs through and underlies the whole 
question that I have raised. Let us look at it in two 
or three particulars. I think, perhaps, that I could 
write a poem, and I think the world ought to render 
me recognition as a poet. What can I do about it } 
I must write a poem which the world shall recognize 
as poetry, and for which it shall be willing to pay, 
else my claim is null and void — mere empty words. 
I may be ever so sure that the poem I have written 
is a masterpiece, and that it will give me fame and 
the gratitude of men ; but if the world does not agree 



THE WORLD. i i 



with me, that is, if I have not been able to do 
something for which the world is willing to pay, 
then I have not the slightest claim for anything in 
the shape of fame or money for the poem that I 
have written. Here is a principle which underlies a 
great deal of the discontent of the world, much of the 
present labor question, and the communistic discus- 
sion, if you will take the trouble to apply it for your- 
selves. Before I can establish any claim for reward 
I must do something, not that is simply work, I must 
do something that the world wants done. Not every 
man that works shall eat. He must do something 
that the world wants done and is willing to pay for, 
before he has any right to demand bread at the 
world's hands. 

Illustrations. 

Suppose that I go out into an unoccupied field and 
work by the day, by the week, by the month, by the 
year, in building stone wall, laboring ten or twelve 
hours a day as hard as I know how. But I am build- 
ing a stone wall where nobody wants a stone wall, 
where it does not answer any purpose of keeping 
anything in or of keeping anything out ; nobody 
wants a wall there, nobody is willing to pay for its 
being put there ; consequently I have not. the slight- 
est claim on anybody to pay me for the labor that I 
have gratuitously performed. The law is that I must 



12 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

do something that the world wants done, and then I 
may ask the world to pay me for it. 

Suppose I think I am an orator. Unless I can 
convince enough people to give me an audience that 
such is the fact, I have no right to claim any reputa- 
tion as an orator nor any reward from the world. 
Suppose I think I am a genius in any direction. If I 
cherish that opinion all to myself and can find nobody 
to agree with me, I may think that the world's judg- 
ment is poor ; I may believe that posterity will accord 
me that which the world refuses now ; but I have no 
recourse and I have no right to find f-ault with the 
world constituted as it is. Take for example two or 
three great illustrations, that you may bring before you 
more forcibly just what I mean. Madame Gerster 
has been singing to crowded audiences, delighting 
Boston and the great cities of the country, within the 
last few weeks. She was born of humble parentage, 
but she inherited — without any merit on her part — 
she inherited a miracle of a voice ; and the world 
that loves to be sung to as marvellously as she can 
sing, is ready to go in crowds and .fling bouquets 
and pour out money at her feet. Now is anybody 
to be praised or is anybody to be blamed for this ? 
Certainly it is no merit of hers that she was 
endowed by nature with this wondrous quality. 
Certainly it is no fault of the world that it. prefers 
the singing of a nightingale to the cawing of a crow. 



THE WORLD. 



13 



The crow may blame any one he pleases for not 
having a better voice, but he cannot blame people for 
not liking his voice unless it is better. So if another 
person thinks he can sing, but cannot convince the 
world, in any large numbers, that his conviction is a 
fact, he has no fault to find, it seems to me, with the 
world. Even when the individual is right and the 
world is wrong, what shall we say then ? Take a 
case like Milton. Milton wrote one of the grandest 
epics of the world, and received as pay for it not the 
wages of a hod carrier or a common carpenter, 
counted in money. It received very few readers and 
very few admirers in his own life time ; but he was 
conscious in his own mind that he had written a work 
that the world would not willingly let die. Was the 
world to blame ? I think not. The men and the women 
that made up the city of London at the time Milton 
wrote were not to blame for their lack of culture or 
poetic taste. Just as Milton had inherited his mag- 
nificent brain, so they had inherited brains that were 
unable to perceive its magnificence. It seems to me 
they are no more to be blamed than blind people are 
for not admiring pictures, or deaf people for not 
loving music. They received what they could, and 
they praised and petted inferior poets, while they 
neglected him. But they praised and petted the best 
they could think and appreciate. And Milton, did he 
lose his reward.'* Would Milton have been wilHng, 



14 LJFE QUESTIONS. 



could he have foreseen the future, to have taken large 
money payment from the crowds of London at his 
time, and have lowered his genius down to their level 
so that they could appreciate it and would be willing 
to pay ? Would he have been willing to have taken 
that and been forgotten, or would he rather prefer 
the consciousness of the magnificence of his genius 
and look for the recognition of higher and nobler 
times ? 

Another striking illustration. I have received a 
paper this week, speaking of the wonderful amount 
of money which Madame Anderson has received 
recently in New York, for the marvellous feat of 
walking which she has performed. She walked 
twenty-seven hundred quarter miles in twenty-seven 
hundred quarter hours, all inside of a few days, and 
she has received for it fifteen thousand dollars. A 
mother, faithful in the performance of her duty and 
the care of her children, laboring night and day, 
watching anxiously and carefully over her babe, 
spends weeks and months and years, and never sees 
at once perhaps one hundred dollars. This higher 
quality of faithful, noble, self-sacrificing motherhood 
the world does not pay by its thousands of dollars, as 
it does one that can perform some wonderful physical 
feat like this. Here is another woman who has a 
literary genius and success. She writes and the 
world appreciates and admires, but she gets no such 



THE WOBLB. 



15 



pay for her brains as Madame Anderson received for 
her muscle. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one man, 
the one American, that Mr. Whittier says will be sure 
to be remembered for a thousand years, for all his 
writings, all the magnificent wealth of his poetry and 
genius, has never received from his publishers so 
much as Madame Anderson made in a few days 
walking. 

Shall we blame tJie World f 

Here is the point — what shall we say .^ Has the 
world wronged Emerson ? I think not. It seems to 
me we must answer again just as we did before. 
There is not a child in Boston that would not pay 
more to see Punch and Judy than it would to see 
Hamlet. Shall we find any fault with the child t We 
may, if we choose, find fault with the constitution of 
the universe that determines that the progress of life 
shall be by development from the simplest things 
up through childhood to appreciative, large-hearted, 
large-brained, manhood and womanhood. We may 
if we will, find fault with the constitution of the uni- 
verse that determines that the progress of men on 
earth shall be from the smallest and lowest beginnings, 
up through the childhood of the race, and only after 
long ages attain the magnificence of heart and brain 
that is able to appreciate the highest and grandest 
things. But so long as the world is in its childhood 



1 6 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

stage, so long as the great masses of men are in their 
childhood stage, we must expect them to be happy 
with childish things. But Emerson is not wronged. 
He has his reward. He i-s receiving it and will 
receive it in the ages that are to come. Would he 
exchange those wonderful poems, those marvellous 
essays, that seer-like insight, that genius of poetic and 
powerful expression, the place that he holds of love, 
of worship, in thousands of hearts that are capable of 
appreciating him — would he exchange that for Mad- 
ame Anderson's muscle and fifteen thousand dollars .'* 
Even Emerson is not wronged. Though his pay 
be small in cash ; in love and reverence and genius 
and power and magic mastery of the hearts and lives 
of his fellow-men, he has received a thousand-fold, 
and will in the ages that are to come. 

T/ie World a Market. 

Remember, then, that this is the law. Here is the 
world — a great market. Go into the world and buy 
what you will, but remember you have no claim on 
anything unless you can pay something that the 
world wants. If you choose to amuse the world, to 
appeal to the lower passions and tastes of the world, 
then, since the majority of men are only partially 
developed, you will gain a larger admiration at the 
present time ; you will gain more money, but you will 



THE WORLD. 



be forgotten when the world has outgrown you. If 
you want to render the world a service in the higher 
ranges of heart and intellect, then serve the world — 
those that can appreciate you — and bide your time. 
Choose, and take the consequences of your choice. 
I would carry it so far, even, as to say that the 
world's martyrs have no right to find fault with the 
world. The world did not appreciate, it cast out 
a-nd crucified Jesus Christ. Was the world to blame .'* 
Only in the sense that an ignorant man is to blame 
because he does not appreciate a high work of 
genius ; only in the sense that the child is to blame 
because he is not a man. Jerusalem worshipped 
that which it thought was righteous. It bowed down 
before that which it thought was sacred and true and 
holy ; and it cast out Jesus with just as much consci- 
entious sincerity as we, to-day, frown upon and cast 
out those that we cannot appreciate or believe in. In 
some cases the world is wrong, in others it is right ; 
and the martyr takes his pay in the consciousness of 
his high choice, and in the admiration of the world 
when it has grown to be large and grand enough to 
admire. 

Causes of Suffering. 

Passing, then, rapidly over this principle, now let 
us raise the question as to who is to blame if the 
world is not. If we have no right to find fault 

2 



1 8 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

with the world because it does not give us what we 
think it ought to pay, who is to blame ? And here I 
wish to bring out an idea large enough and far- 
reaching enough in its sweep and consequences to 
make not a sermon but a book in itself. I wish to 
bring out the idea that a large part of the evils under 
which we suffer, and for which, in a general way, we 
blame the world and get out with it, are things that 
we ourselves are responsible for, that we can either 
prevent or cure ; not always, not completely, but so 
largely that if we would devote our heart and our 
strength to it we could renovate life. Look for a 
moment, and let me run through a few of the things 
and evils that we suffer under, those that cause 
the greatest amount of pain, and discomfort, and 
trial, — what are they .-* 

First on the list stands ill-health. Half the world's 
sorrows, half its troubles, half its discomforts at 
least, half its discouragements, half its melancholy, 
half its blues that color and darken the world, come 
simply from that one thing, ill-health. Who is to 
blame for that ? In some cases we are not. We 
have inherited a tendency toward disease. But nine 
times out of ten — I say it in case of my own 
sickness, including myself just as much as anybody 
else — we ourselves are to blame. In a general way, 
I believe it is among the duties of men and women to 
be well. I think that in nine cases out of ten men and 



THE WOBLD. 



19 



women might fairly be called on to show cause why 
they are sick. I have not been sick in any serious 
fashion but once for several years, and then nobody 
in the wide world was to blame for it but myself. 
We eat, and drink, and dress, and expose ourselves ; 
are thoughtless and careless in every direction, and 
so most of the sickness under which we suffer is 
purely and simply our own fault ; not the fault of the 
world or the fault of our neighbors — evils that are 
curable or preventable. 

What is the next great cause of suffering, of the 
pains, the discomforts we bear.? It seems to me it 
lies just here. Not that we have not enough to make 
us happy, enough to make us comfortable, but that 
while having all the things, the raw material of 
comfort and well-being about us, we persistently 
fasten our attention on something we have not, 
and determine to make ourselves miserable on that 
account. There is hardly one of you all that has not 
the materials for a comfortable and happy life. We 
are like the children that we watch and reprove for 
their peculiarities. I see my own children playing 
on the floor in a perfect wilderness of books and toys, 
miserable, unhappy and discontented because they 
do not possess something they would be tired of in 
five minutes if they had it, just as they are of the 
things they have; or because some other boy or 
some other little girl that they know has something 



20 L^FE QUESTIONS. 

they have not. How large a part of the discomforts, 
the sorrows, the sufferings that trouble you, grow 
out of precisely such a root as that. You are living, 
perhaps, on such a street, having everything that 
heart can wish, but miserable because you have not 
the finest house on a more fashionable avenue. 
Because you have not something that somebody else 
has, you are discontented and unhappy. Purely 
needless, you have no right to find fault with either 
God or man for sufferings and discomforts like these. 

And then there is another grand source of suffering 
and sorrow for which we are disposed to blame the 
general system of things, the universe, or God, or 
man, or somebody else, when nobody is responsible 
for it but ourselves ; and that is this persistent fore- 
boding of evil. People, on the pleasantest day, if you 
say, " It is a pleasant day," will look all around the 
sky to see if they cannot find a weather -breeder 
somewhere that will promise a storm to-morrow. 
They will shoulder upon themselves and be crushed 
down by a hundred burdens that they have not the 
least assurance in the world that they will ever be 
called on to bear. One-half at least of the burdens 
we carry, and that crush our hearts and make us sad, 
are pure shadow trials of which we have no business 
to take any account. 

And then there is another grand source of sorrow 
and discomfort that comes to people, oh, to so many 



THE WORLD. 



— ennui — the feeling that their life is useless and 
aimless, purely for the reason that they have not 
some grand, noble thing to do to wake up their 
enthusiasm, to stir them, to lift them up, to make 
them feel their life is worth living. People will live 
year after year in a condition like this when the 
world is not half finished, hardly begun, and on every 
hand is work calling, begging, appealing to be done, 
if men would only find it ; if women would only find 
it. I think it is just to say that women in high states 
of civilization are the ones that suffer most from this, 
almost for the simple reason that either their sense 
of propriety or their habits or training, or something 
or other, keeps them from going out into the world 
and finding something to engage their hand and 
heart, and to fill up the measure and fullness of their 
enthusiasm. 

T/ie Question aiiswered. 

These then, with others that I shall leave you to 
think of, are the grand burdens under which we suf- 
fer. And as I said, they are burdens that you need 
not carry, or at least you need not carry to one-half 
the extent which you do. What, then, in a word of 
suggestion, in the light of these truths that I have 
outlined, in the light of these burdens needlessly 
borne, what, in the summing up, have I a right to say 
that we may reasonably expect of the world .^ Here 



22 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



we are ; each one of us having come into this world 
as the scene of our activity and enjoyment or suffer- 
ing. What may we expect reasonably to gain by it ? 
The world offers — and you have no claim on it by 
which you may assume that it would offer anything 
else — the world offers opportunity. Here for exam- 
ple is an opportunity for you to enter into all this 
wondrous mysterious universe of beauty. Oh, how 
^blindly we walk over the face of this marvel of a 
world ! We stumble along amid the grass and the 
flowers. Some one comes behind us that can appre- 
ciate their beauty and their mystery, and bows down 
before them awe-struck at the marvel and over- 
whelmed with the wonder that we neglect and scorn. 
The world all around us is one marvel of wonder and 
beauty ; and the key to it is what ? Thought, culti- 
vation, appreciation of every opportunity, purity of 
heart and thought on our part. Until we attain this 
the world will be locked to us wherever we are. Put 
any man into the finest picture gallery of the world, 
surround him with superior works of art, but if he 
have not purity of heart and appreciation, something 
of self-development and culture, there is a veil drawn 
over every beauty and nothing is open to him. If 
you will only fit yourself to appreciate it the world 
offers you limitless mystery and beauty. 

It affords you an opportunity in another direction — 
an opportunity of doing some good service. People 



rilE WORLD. 



talk about the world's being full. You remember 
that saying of Daniel Webster's, that advice of his to 
a young lawyer who asked him if there was any room 
in the legal profession. He said there was " room 
enough at the top." We feel perhaps in regard to 
the mechanical development of the world that almost 
everything has been invented that can be. But every 
little while somebody startles the world with some 
new mechanical contrivance. We feel that every 
great subject for poetry has been written upon ; until 
some man with a deeper insight startles the world 
with a fresh masterpiece. There is room enough, 
there is opportunity everywhere. The world is not 
exhausted; hardly the surface has been scratched. 
There is just as much opportunity for the grand ser- 
vice of man — for heroism, for nobility, for devotion 
— as there ever was. Perhaps we shall not become 
distinguished for the doing of these things that we 
can perform. No matter; you had better be fit for 
an office than to be in it ; you had better be worthy 
of fame than to get it ; you had better be worthy of 
love and all men's honor than to have them at your 
feet and know in your own heart that you are hollow 
and a sham. There is opportunity to be, there is 
opportunity to do as noble things as the world has ever 
dreamed. Here is the secret of content, and you 
will never find it anywhere else. I appeal to you to- 
day, to look through all your past life while I tell you 



24 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

it is true of my own experience, and to ask yourself 
if it is not true of yours, that the solidest comfort you 
have ever attained has been when you have waked 
up to the consciousness that you have been of some 
little use to somebody, that you have done .some 
good to the world. There is, then, an opportunity 
for happiness as well as beauty and service. There 
is no one of you that has not about him abundant 
opportunities for happiness in this poor old world 
that we call sin-sick and corrupt and evil. You may 
have a friend if you will only prove yourself worthy 
of one by being a noble and true friend yourself. 
You may gain the love of some man or woman noble 
as you deserve and perhaps a good deal nobler. You 
may have a home, children of your own, or others, 
loving you and looking up to your face with worship, 
and playing about your feet. You have all the mate- 
rials out of which to construct a song sweet as the 
choiring stars above you. The only condition is that 
you shall make your lives as bright and orderly as 
the stars. 



S^nntr ^it^stinn. 



WHAT IS THE RELATION OF THE BODY TO THE MIND 
AND SOUL? 



What is Man? 

If we should stand for the first time in the presence 
of another man, and try to find out what sort of a 
being he is, what would be the result ? In the first 
place, of course, the outline and bulk of his body- 
would be apparent. If there were an anatomist by 
he would tell us the bones of which the inner 
structure of this body were composed. The physi- 
ologist would tell us about the muscles • and the 
organs, their relations, their functions, the part they 
play in this mechanism. The chemist would tell us 
of what elements the body is made ; how much 
water, how much lime, how much this, that and the 
other go to make it up. The artist would look at it 
from the standpoint of beauty. And so each one, 
according to the trend of his thought and investiga- 
tion, would help us to form our complete conception 
of the external or physical man. But if we raise the 



26 I^^FE QUESTIONS. 



question, Is this all of him ? we shall find out that 
from the first dawn of human history until now, 
practically all men everywhere — there have been 
few exceptions — have believed that this was not all. 
They have said, inside of this physical frame, located 
at some particular point, or diffused through it, is a 
spiritual entity ; somewhere about this physical man 
there is another somewhat called mind, soul, shade, 
spirit, or whatever name may have been applied to it. 
Sometimes they have spoken of two or three invisible 
tenants, or invisible under ordinary circumstances, 
though capable of manifesting themselves at times 
to the eye, to the ear, to the touch. Paul divides 
man, in one of his epistles, into three parts, a sort of 
human trinity, the body, the animal soul and spirit 
or immortal soul. I am not now going into the varie- 
ties of thought concerning these subjects, the origin 
of the belief, nor the line of its development. These 
questions lie outside of my present purpose. But 
I must, in passing, give you two or three principal 
theories that have been held concerning the relation 
in which body and mind stand to each other. 

AbsU'act TJieories. 

There is a body, and there is a something we call 
mind. The school of materialists, ancient and mod- 
ern, whatever difference of form their speculations 



THE BODY. 27 



may take, teach us that the mind is in some myste- 
rious way a product of the bodily organization ; and 
they tell us that when the body is taken to pieces by 
death, the mind itself will dissolve and cease to exist 
as a separate entity. Mind, then, according to the 
materialist, is the product of the body. There is 
another school, and that ancient and modern, which 
holds to the pre-existence of this mind or soul, and 
they teach the precise contrary of the materialists ; 
that is, they say the mind existed first, and it has 
shaped the body to itself, making of it a fitting 
instrument. So, while the one school teaches that 
the mind is the result of body, the other teaches that 
the body is the result of mind. There is another 
school of thought still, connected with the famous 
name of the great philosopher, Leibnitz, who taught 
what he called the pre-established harmony ; that is, 
he could not understand how the body could act on 
mind, or mind could act on body, and so he taught 
the doctrine that God, from the first, established 
a sort of harmonious relation between these two, 
designating definitely their influence. So that when 
I think of moving my arm the arm moves ; but he 
says it is not the thought that makes it move ; only 
God has established such a relation between the 
thought and the arm that they move together ; when 
the thought wishes the arm to move the arm moves : 
and so concerning every other mental or physical 



28 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



operation. St;ill another school, represented chiefly 
by Spinoza, teaches the doctrine of pantheism. This 
holds that God himself is the only real substance 
in the universe, the only substantial being, and that 
matter and mind both are only local and temporary 
manifestations of God — only waves rising for a 
moment and sinking again into the sea of eternal and 
everlasting being which is God. These are the four 
grand theories that have been held concerning the 
relation of the mind and the body. 

JV/iat do we Know about It? 

Now, I propose to come simply and directly to the 
question, How much do we really know about it? 
what do we know about mind '^ what do we know 
about body, and the relation they sustain to each 
other.'* Directly, we know nothing at all about either 
of them, as to what they are in their essence. We 
know nothing at all about matter in itself ; we know 
nothing at all about mind in itself. All that we do 
know is certain facts of consciousness. For example, 
I touch this book. I receive an impression of some- 
thing hard and smooth. This touch is transmitted 
by the nerves to the brain, and in some mysterious 
way — I know not, and nobody knows — I become 
conscious of touching something that resists my 
touch, and that is smooth to my hand. I infer the 



THE BODY. 



29 



existence of something possessing those qualities 
that I call hardness and smoothness. This is the 
only knowledge we have of this external world. 
People sometimes seem to think they know all about 
matter ; but you know nothing at all except by this 
method of inference from your various sensations. 

What do we know about mind ,? Our knowledge 
about mind is of precisely the same kind — an infer- 
ence from consciousness. I think. I infer, then, that 
there is something that corresponds to this sensation 
of thought. I have a feeling of love, of hate, of fear, 
of hope. I infer that there is something that thinks, 
something that loves, something that hopes, some- 
thing that fears. 

And here comes a distinction that I wish to make 
very clear in its impression upon your minds. Matter 
translates itself into my consciousness as something 
having length, breadth, thickness, hardness or power 
of resi-stance, color, weight, and other attributes with 
which you are perfectly familiar. Things which 
manifest themselves to me in this way I call matter. 
But the thought of the mind, love, hope, fear — these 
things have no thickness, they have no length, they 
have no breadth, they have no weight, they have no 
color. There is, then, so far as we know anything 
about it, not simply a difference between these two, 
but an absolute unlikeness. Now, then, as I said a 
moment ago, the materialist sometimes talks as 



30 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

though he knew all about matter, but knew nothing 
about mind. If he will think a little more deeply, he 
will find that he knows just as much about mind as 
he does about matter; and that, as to what they are 
in themselves, he knows nothing at all about either of 
them. We only infer certain things from these facts 
of consciousness. Here, then, is what we know 
concerning what matter is, and what mind is. But 
we do know that these two somewhats are related 
to each other in some mysterious way ; in such a way 
that the body acts upon the mind, and the mind in 
its turn reacts upon the body ; or, if you choose to 
start the other way, the mind acts and the body 
reacts. There is mutual action and reaction between 
the body and the mind. And how important and 
mighty this movement of action and reaction is I 
propose to illustrate by reading just a few words 
from a book which I have in my hand. In No. 3 of 
the Popular Science Monthly Supplement is an arti- 
cle by Mr. Frederick Harrison on the subject of " The 
soul and the future life." In it he uses these words — 
I read them because, in a compact and simple way, 
they express all that I wish to bring before you 
better than I could state it : 

" Man is one, however compound. Fire his con- 
science and he blushes ; check his circulation and 
he thinks wildly or not at all ; impair his secretions 
and the moral sense is dulled, discolored or depraved ; 



THE BODY. 31 



his aspirations flag, his hope and love both reel ; 
impair them still more and he becomes a brute. A 
cup of drink degrades his moral nature below that of 
a swine. Again, a violent emotion of pity or horror 
makes him vomit. A lancet will restore him from 
delirium to clear thought. Excessive thought will 
waste his energy. Excess of muscular exercise will 
deaden thought. An emotion will double the strength 
of his muscles ; and at last a prick of a needle or a 
grain of mineral will in an instant lay to rest forever 
his body and its unity." 

That sets forth in a very forcible way the power 
which the mind has on the body, and which the body 
has on the mind. By ill using the body you are 
perfectly aware that you can utterly destroy mental 
power, and lay it, so far as we know upon this earth, 
at rest forever. And it is not simply in story books 
or in poems that you come across the facts of the 
marvelous power which the mind has over the body. 
There are perfectly well-authenticated cases, in medi- 
cal treatises and in scientific works, of the mind's 
having had the power to disease the body, to cripple 
it, and even to put it to death. Not alone in poetry do 
men die of a broken heart. I believe that the reality 
of death from broken heart is just as real as death 
from fever or from consumption. 



32 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



The Power of the Body over the Mind. 

So mighty is the power of the mind over the body. 
But the point which I wish to dwell upon more espe- 
cially now, is the power of the body over the mind. 
Let me give you in two or three ascending grades of 
thought, some illustration of what I mean. You are 
perfectly familiar with the idea that as you rise in the 
morning your bodily condition may make all the 
difference in the world with the weather or aspect 
that the day shall present to you. A headache, the 
result, perhaps, of a late supper or of the dyspepsia, 
may not only be able to clothe the earth in gloom, 
and drape the heavens in blackness, but spread a pall 
over life so black that it does not seem to you worth 
living. The condition of the body, then, touches 
very intimately the question of happiness. It touches 
no less intimately the conditions of good work in the 
world. Here is a thing very simple and yet far- 
reaching and true, that the best work of the world, 
the healthiest, noblest work, has always been done by 
healthy physiques, by strong bodies, by good diges- 
tions. One of the most important things in the 
world for a man who will do nobly and faithfully his 
life work, is the condition in which he shall keep his 
body. One of the most important do I say } Why 
it is all important ; more so, perhaps, than almost 



THE BODY. 



33 



anything else. For whatever the mind- may be able 
to do in another sphere, whatever it may be able to do 
when finally separated from this body, we know that 
here mental and spiritual action depend entirely upon 
physical conditions. It has been a popular doctrine 
that the body was a sort of veil, a covering, the 
prison-house of the soul ; and you hear it many a time 
in poetry, in song, in popular pulpit discourse, this 
talk of the body being a drag upon the soul, and of 
how we will mount up on wings as light as air when 
once the body is broken down and we are free. It is 
all a fancy and a dream. That is, there is not one 
single thing that we know that looks that way in the 
slightest. So far as' we know anything about it the 
body is not an obtsruction to the soul, the body is 
not a prison-house ; the body is not a bandage, bind- 
ing and crippling and limiting its freedom and its 
power. It is the divinely appointed medium of men- 
tal and spiritual manifestation ; the only means by 
which we come in contact with the universe of God 
and our fellowmen. I know nothing about what the 
conditions of life may be when the soul is finally 
freed from the body, but so far as this life is con- 
cerned the power of the spirit, the power of the mind 
over the world is limited by and conditioned on the 
physical condition, physical health, and physical fit- 
ness for the work we have to do. If there were 
either an angel or a God under the dome of the skull, 
3 



34 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

his ability to work in this world would be limited and 
conditioned by the brain. No matter how magnifi- 
cent mental power may be, it is limited, I say, and 
conditioned by the instrument with which it must 
work in coming into contact with this physical life 
that we live here beneath the stars. If Hercules 
should come again to earth, and instead of his club you 
should put into his hands a brittle reed and compel 
him to work and strike with that, it would not be the 
power of Hercules, it would be simply the power of 
the reed. He would be limited by the instrument 
with which he must work. Take the magnificent 
power of steam ; if you enclose it within a weak, ill- 
constructed or broken engine, you have not the 
almost omnipotence of steam at your disposal ; you 
have simply a crippled and broken engine. Take an 
artist and give him poor canvas, and poor pigments, 
and a poor brush, and he cannot display his real 
power; you have limited him by the instruments and 
by the materials with which he must work. So, I 
say, whatever this mental or moral power of the 
brain may be, it is limited by the condition of the 
brain ; and the condition of the brain is limited by 
the condition of the body, which is the basis and con- 
dition of all high mental and spiritual work. I say, 
then, that the body has power to cripple all the noble 
work that you might be able to do. There are a few 
cases that are apparently exceptions to this rule — 



THE BODY. 35 



geniuses and poets who were physically diseased 
throughout their whole lives. But you may go 
through the whole list from every ancient and civil- 
ized nation of the world, and pick out those that did 
work under conditions of disease, and you will find 
traces of that disease marring and crippling, or lim- 
iting the results. Rounded, complete mental work 
has only been done by minds that sat enthroned in 
healthy brains. 

Influence of the Body on Morals and Religion. 

Not only that, but moral conditions are determined 
very largely by the condition of the body. A promi- 
nent scientific man in Germany, after having spent 
years in studying the skulls and brains of criminals, 
has made this assertion ; that not once in his whole 
life has he found a confirmed and chronic criminal 
who had a healthy brain. Where do chronic pauper- 
ism and chronic vice and chronic crimes of our great 
cities come from.? In exceptional cases — perhaps 
no exception to this law, however, if we could trace 
them — in exceptional cases they come from the 
families with healthy ancestry, and living in the 
midst of healthy conditions; but nine out of ten, 
ninety-nine out of a hundred, come out of impure 
sanitary and physical conditions, where the very air 
is miasma, disease and death. 



36 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

Not only morals, but even religions, the distorted 
conceptions of God, the theological infamies of the 
past, the libels on the divine character, the shapes of 
demoniac power and hate that we see conjured from 
the depths of darkness — all these, without exception, 
have come from diseased, distorted, unhealthy physi- 
cal conditions of the world ; come from those times 
of half-development, when the brain itself was 
hardly human ; when man had not learned the power 
by which he is subjected, the underlying forces of the 
world about him ; when he looked upon the lightning, 
the storm, the pestilence, the famine, the cold and 
the hunger as spirit enemies that sought to destroy 
him. These theologies that to-day make the popular 
God a Moloch, the theologies that teach such dis- 
torted and hopeless thoughts concerning man, the 
theologies that people the heavens above us and the 
future with shapes of horror — they are simply un- 
healthy dreams that haunt man's waking hours. 
They have come out of physical unhealth and physi- 
cal incapacity reaching up so as to grasp, as it were, 
the powers of thought and love and hope that we call 
the mental and spiritual forces of man. Such then, 
reaching from the simple beginning of happiness up 
through the centres of life to morals and to God — 
such is the sweep and scope of this power which the 
body and its conditions are able to exercise over the 
mind, the heart, and the soul. 



TUE BODY. 



17 



The Duty of Physical Development. 

You ought, then — and here is one result follow- 
ing from these thoughts, if I have placed them 
clearly before you — you ought, you that are fathers 
and mothers in your homes, to make it your first 
care to see to it that the children grow up physically 
strong and well. And I wish to warn you and to 
put you on guard concerning the matter of schools 
— the mental development of your children. So 
far as the future of your boy or girl is concerned, 
the capacity to do the work that will be laid upon 
their shoulders by and by, to carry life's burdens, 
more than on everything else this capacity depends 
on the simple matter as to whether the boy or girl is 
or is not healthy. Knowledge of music, knowledge 
of mathematics, knowledge of history, knowledge of 
anything is insignificant compared with the question 
as to whether, when they stand on the border land of 
manhood and womanhood, they stand there physical- 
ly strong and well. There is a lesson here of charity 
as indicated in what I have said concerning the moral 
and theological perversions, crimes, distortions and 
diseased ideas of the world. Not that these things 
are made right merely because they spring out of 
physical conditions ; but remember at any rate that 
they are matters largely beyond individual control, 



38 LJ^FE QUESTIONS. 

matters to be delivered from by slow degrees ; and 
let charity dwell in your heart, and love in your 
nature, and encouragement find utterance through 
your voice. And remember that not simply by build- 
ing churches, not simply by establishing rituals, rites, 
holidays, and scattering bibles and good books over 
the world are you to lift up the moral and spiritual 
condition of man. I believe that the souls of men 
would be helped more really in our great cities by 
cleansing the slums, lifting up these low places, giv- 
ing men good air to breathe, good water to drink and 
healthful homes to live in. I say that morals and 
religion would be helped on more rapidly by these 
things than by all the preaching and all the mag- 
nificent rituals of long ages ; for these things are at 
the foundation of it all. 

Practical Applicatiojis, 

The practical outcome of this and the lessons that 
I wish to enforce upon your minds are some very 
commonplace ones, very commonplace indeed ; and 
yet, because commonplace, exceedingly important 
for you to think about and regard. What are the 
conditions of keeping the body in health so that the 
mind may be free and clear and strong ? There are 
certain things that are beyond our control that I will 
only hint at, matters of inheritance of which I have 



THE BODY. 



39 



spoken. Then there may be, for aught we know, 
emanations from the earth, electrical currents sweep- 
ing around the globe ; influences of sun and planet 
and stars ; forces that touch us when we do not know 
that we are touched ; things that lift up and depress, 
concerning which we have no practical knowledge, 
and if we had knowledge perhaps we should have 
no practical power to control. But the great things 
are the very small things. 

Food. 

And first the simple matter of food. It used to be 
taught that the student and the religious man ought 
to under-feed themselves ; that if they ate too much 
they clogged the brain and interfered with mental 
progress. Of course that is true, if one eats too much. 
But out of this anxiety not to eat too much have 
grown maxims such as " Always rise from the table 
while you are hungry." If a man eats so rapidly 
that he may get a good deal more than he needs 
before he finds it out, why, he had better rise from the 
table hungry. But if he eats slowly, so that he 
knows when he has eaten enough, then he had better 
eat always until he is satisfied. And then it is often 
said that people eat too many kinds of things, and 
those that are too nice in quafity. ~It is said that 
you must live on graham bread, oatmeal mush, on 



40 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

this thing or on that ; or you must not eat more than 
one kind of thing at a meal. Do not think these are 
unimportant things, not dignified enough to be spoken 
of in the pulpit. I tell you they reach to your mind 
and to your morals ; they reach to your theology ; 
they reach clear to heaven, so far as you are con- 
cerned, and are of fundamental importance, touching 
your religious and moral life a good deal more, some- 
times, than what you think about the Bible, or think 
about Sunday, or think about any other religious 
institution whatever. What shall I say, then, concern- 
ing this matter of how many kinds of things you 
may eat ? The safest rule is, so far as they are within 
your means, eat just as many kinds of things as you 
want and can get. The body is made up of a large 
number of chemical constituents. If you eat only 
one thing, the chances are that you will supply only 
a part of the wants of the body. Your appetite, if 
you are healthy, is a good guide. Eat enough, then, 
and eat as many kinds of things as you please. Feed 
the body, feed it properly and feed it enough, for the 
sake of mind, and for the sake of character. For a 
diminution of food may not only render one insane, 
but a poor quality of food may be the root, not only 
of physical deterioration, but of moral as well. If I 
had'time I could give you many illustrations of this. 
Take it to-day on trust, and look it up for yourselves. 



THE BODY 



41 



Sleep. 

And the next most important matter concerning 
health is sleep. How many hours shall I sleep ? 
You might as well ask how much water a sponge will 
hold. Try it and find out, and. let it absorb all that it 
will. And so I believe that it is not simply your 
right, but your duty to sleep all that you can sleep. 
Tedious watching, care and anxiety, a thousand 
things may interfere to rob you of this, which is a 
fundamental condition of health. And yet sleep 'all 
you can. But do not fall into this error, which was 
so common a few years ago — I believe it is being 
outgrown — this thinking it is a virtue on the part of 
your children to get up very early in the morning, 
before they have slept enough. The simple fact that 
you want to sleep is God's command, as sacred as 
though it came right out of heaven to you, to sleep. 
The desire to sleep means that sleep is needed. 
"Tl'hcre is no rule, then, that you can follow. If you 
are compelled to sit up late, then sleep late in the 
morning. It is no virtue on your part to get up 
early, unless you have slept enough. The only 
virtue about it is to get up when you have slept all 
that the body needs, and all that the brain needs. 
And particular emphasis ought to be laid upon this 
matter, concerning those in business or in the pro- 



42 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

fessions. A man who gets up at six o'clock in the 
morning and goes to work in the mill, or with the 
shovel, or with the axe, may sometimes think that the 
professional man is- simply lazy and self-indulgent, 
because he does not get up until eight o'clock ; when, 
perhaps, after the day's labor he himself went to 
sleep at eight or nine o'clock, and has slept enough : 
while the professional is kept up until ten, eleven, 
twelve, or two o'clock. And then, on the other 
hand, he overlooks the other fundamental fact that 
he who performs mere physical labor can rest by 
simply keeping still, whether he sleeps or not. But 
there is no way of resting the brain except by sleep ; 
that is, the brain will not keep still except it is 
asleep. So that the professional man, or the man 
who works with his brain, needs more sleep than 
he who works with his hands. 

Work 

And then the matter of labor ; this also is neces- 
sary to health. Something to do, something that 
shall call out all the faculties. And, then, the matter 
of recreation. I cannot dwell upon these. I simply 
suggest them to you. Labor and recreation are just 
as -essential to health as food and sleep. Now there 
is much that may be said upon the other side. I have 
dwelt purposely and chiefly on the effect the body 



THE BODY. 



43 



has upon the mind. I wish to close now with some 
suggestions, condensed into one, concerning the 
power of the mind over the body. Keep the mind 
healthy, because if the mind is diseased in its action, 
getting unhealthy and morbid, it reacts on the body, 
diseasing that; and the body again reacts on the 
mind, and makes it worse than it was to begin with. 
If some diseased action starts in the body, in the 
hand, or in any other organ, it causes an unusual and 
unnatural supply of blood there ; that raises what we 
call an inflammation, and this intensifies and grows, 
increasing the diseased action, until, if it be not 
arrested by the physical forces of the other parts of 
the system, it results in death. The blood produces 
an increase of power where it does not belong ; pre- 
cisely as though a mill should have an unusual head 
of water turned on. If you turn on just the right 
quantity of water, the wheels will run just as you 
want them to, and do the kind of work you wish 
them to do ; if you lessen the supply, of course tliere 
is want of action, and the work is not done ; if you 
increase it, and turn it into a flood, there is activity, 
but the very action operates to the destruction of the 
machinery. Precisely a similar thing goes on in the 
body in the case of inflammation of this kind. 



44 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



Mental Inflammation. 

And a similar thing goes on in the mind. When 
there is excessive action of the mind on one principle, 
or upon one idea, all the forces of the being turn 
themselves to one thought, and then become inflamed 
and diseased, until the person becomes one-sided. 
Carry it far enough, and it is what we call insanity ; 
carry it a little less far, and you have the hobby 
rider, the one-idea man, the man, who never thinks of 
anything, and who cannot think of anything, except 
his notion. It works, however, in more serious 
directions. There are hobby riders who carry this 
excessive mental action in one direction until they 
become insane. There are men and women who, for 
one cause and another, carry a similar action of the 
mind to such an extent that they become diseased 
concerning the real work of the world. Take the 
penitent, for example. Suppose you have done 
wrong, been guilty of a crime. What of it.'' It is 
past. It is of no use to sit down and weep over it, 
and concentrate your thoughts upon it. Leave it ; 
fling it out of sight ; concentrate your thought on 
something else, lest you become diseased and morbid 
in this direction, and unfit for the work of the world. 
Overbalance this by counter irritation. Live in some 
other realm, in some other department of your 



THE BODY. 



45 



thought, and thus become healthy and redeemed 
from these morbid influences of the past. 

To come to a more sensitive point still, but not 
the less important, concerning affliction or loss. You 
have lost some dear friend. Some one that was your 
life, the centre of your heart and of your affection. 
It becomes with you almost a religion to cherish that 
memory, to think of that and let the world alone, to 
sit down beside this grave in the past and let the 
great work of the world go undone so far as you are 
concerned. This, when carried too far, ceases to be 
simply a memory, and becomes a disease. Do not 
cherish even your griefs, then, over much. Remem- 
ber what you can do in other paths to the poor, 
grieved hearts still throbbing, to assist those that are 
not yet permitted to lie down to sleep, the sorrows 
all around you that you can heal. Then, overcome 
this private grief by turning your attention in anoth- 
er direction, living in another part of your being, and 
making yourself useful and helpful to the world. 



WHAT IS GOOD SOCIETY AND HOW AM I RELATED TO IT ? 



Two Me'anings of Society. 

You will understand of course that I wish a dis- 
tinction to be drawn between the broader and the 
narrower senses of the word, society. When we say- 
that man is a social animal, we mean that instead 
of living by himself it is his nature to congre- 
gate, to aggregate into communities, into villages, 
cities, states and nations. We mean something else, 
something much narrower, something quite distinct, 
when we speak about the best society, or good society, 
or when we talk about a person's going into society. 
It is this less and narrower sense, which needs no 
further distinction, that I wish you to keep in mind, 
and about which I am to speak. To some minds this 
might appear to be a secular topic better fitted for a 
lecture than a sermon ; and yet, when you reflect how 
large a part of the ordinary life of the world to-day 
finds expression in what we call' society, you will 



SOCIETY. 



47 



agree with me, I think, that the rights, the duties, 
the obligations in which we stand to each other, as 
thus related, is something quite important enough to 
be brought within the domain of moral and religious 
teachino:. 



'O' 



Ideas around which Society has Crystallized. 

First I wish to bring before your minds the differ- 
ent ideas around which society has been accustomed, 
in the past, to crystallize itself. The oldest good 
society on the face of the earth, so far as we know, 
is that which was represented by the old families, 
the patrician class for example, in ancient Rome ; 
those that have behind them a long line of ancestry ; 
those that can speak of themselves as ancient fami- 
lies ; who are proud of the achievements, the repu- 
tations, the renown of their forefathers. Now I 
believe, as we must, who have studied this question 
at all, that it is just as true of man as it is anywhere 
else, that blood will tell. A farmer manifests his 
faith in this principle when he seeks out the finest 
variety of pear or grape, when he seeks to graft on 
to the old variety some new species, some higher 
and finer and juicier development than he has been 
able to grow upon the old stock. We recognize it 
everywhere in the animal world ; and I believe it is 
just as true in the case of man. This idea sprung 



48 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

first from the pretensions of the old families of kings 
and nobles that they did indeed have a distinct and 
separate origin from that of the great mass and ma- 
jority of men. The Emperors of Peru and Mexico, 
when the Spaniards came to this new world, asserted 
for themselves the claim familiar from the first dawn 
of history in Europe, Asia and Africa, that their 
ancestors were divine, that they were children of the 
sun ; the sun looked upon as a deity, a god. And 
there is an ancient Hindoo tradition traced to the 
Laws of Manu. This tradition is the origin of the 
system of caste as it exists in India to-day. It asserts 
that the Creator made the Brahmins out of his brain 
— of his head ; that is the highest caste. That he 
created the soldiers out of his arms, his shoulders and 
his breast ; that the artisans and agriculturists were 
created out of his thighs and his loins ; and that the 
servants sprung from his feet. They had then, a 
distinct and separate origin for all these castes and 
classes of men from the highest to the lowest ; they 
believed they were distinct ; and on any account, 
consequently, could not be fused together. I say I 
believe there is something noble about this tradition 
of a grand ancestry. I can understand the pride of 
the old Spaniard, who called himself an Hidalgo — 
son of somebody. 

But this rule does not work succesfully down from 
the first to the last, and we find- that the principle 



SOCIETY. 



49 



finally runs itself completely out. The sons of noble 
fathers are not always themselves noble. The sons 
of the wise and great are sometimes stupid and 
foolish, because other blood comes in and it is impos- 
sible to keep the quality of an ancestry like this 
from being mixed and mingled with all sorts of 
foreign changes and taints that shall change its grain 
and course. And it has been found that this form of 
society wears itself out and passes away because 
there are men sprung from the lowest ranges of 
society, that by the power of brain and heart assert 
their right to stand at the front and lead the world. 
And the men that simply had great fathers are com- 
pelled to bow before the great son of a father who 
was not great. And so I say this principle wears 
itself out. And where it lingers to-day, the remnant, 
the last played-out fag-end of this old tradition in 
the F. F. Vs. of the South or the Van Something-or- 
others of our great metropolis, or in the sons of those 
whose fathers were somebody or something in our 
Colonial history, it becomes simply a theme for 
amusement and ridicule. And who is there of us 
that would not rather be, as Napoleon said he was, 
his own ancestor; who would not rather have our 
children proud of us, though we be not able to be 
proud of our ancestry.? 

The next principle around which society has organ- 
ized itself is the principle of wealth, that which is 
4 



50 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

dominant, perhaps, in America to-day. Now I wish 
not to speak one word slightingly of this, but to be 
calmly and fairly just in my estimate of it. A man 
who rightfully, honorably achieves a fortune, has 
manifested in one department of his life, in one 
direction, unusual power and ability ; and he deserves 
the credit that belongs to masterhood wherever it is 
capable of manifesting itself. But remember, the 
power to gain and acquire wealth is only one side of 
a man. And when we measure him, as measure him 
we must, by the higher standards of manhood, we 
may be compelled to put him away down out of sight, 
beneath the feet of the man who has no sort of 
faculty or power to acquire wealth, because this is 
not the highest and grandest faculty of manhood. 
The man of wealth, then, to-day, has come as he 
should come, to be measured, not by the quantity of 
wealth that he may acquire, but by how he acquires 
it and how he uses it and when and where. That is, 
this simple power that he is capable of manifesting is 
coming to be measured by the dominant moral qual- 
ity of the world, and to take its rank where it belongs. 
— something noble and true and to be honored, but 
not the highest, not the best. And society, when it 
organizes itself around this principle alone, when 
men arrogate to themselves superiority over their 
fellows, simply because they are rich, they are not to 
be respected by the thoughtful- and the wise; they 
manifest not superiority but snobbery. 



SOCIETY. 5 1 



Another principle around which society is aggre- 
gated is that of intellectual culture. Here again is 
something noble, something grand, something to be 
honored. And this culture, this learning the truth 
of things, this finding out the methods of God in the 
heavens, in the earth ; this recovery of the wisdom, 
the thoughts, the purposes, the hopes, the fears of 
the past — these are freeing the world gradually from 
its superstition and leading it out of intellectual and 
moral slavery and cowardice into the possession of 
its own manhood and freedom. And yet there is 
something higher even than a man's brain ; and the 
society that organizes itself around this simply is not 
the best society. For character is above brains, and 
brain is of worth only as it contributes to and con- 
stitutes character. So that when little knots and 
coteries of people gather themselves around Plato or 
Shakespeare or any other man who stands for some 
department of the world's culture, and when they 
assume to themselves superiority over all the world 
because they have had the time and the leisure and 
the taste to familiarize themselves with these things 
they become dilettanti, that are contemptible and 
not to be honored. As an illustration of what I 
mean and how far it is sometimes carried : I was 
talking with one of the most prominent and best- 
known men of Massachusetts the other day and he 
told me that a lady living in Boston — I won't say 



52 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



what quarter of it — was speaking with a friend of 
his the other day, and she was referring to the 
section of the city in which we, as she thought, were 
unfortunate enough to Uve. Speaking of somebody's 
proposing to get up a Chaucer class, she remarked 
superciliously: "A society to read Chaucer at the 
South End ! As though there was anybody at the 
South End that knew anything about Chaucer ! " I 
speak of this simply as illustrating the infinitesimally 
contemptible quality that may allay itself with merely 
intellectual culture ; speaking of how poor and mean 
a thing it is when it arrogates its supremacy in 
society above qualities that are nobler than itself. 
Then society gathers around merely the idea of 
amusement; but I will not enlarge upon this. 

What is Good Society. 

And now let us raise the question and answer it 
clearly to ourselves as to what constitutes good society. 
There would seem to be a great deal of mysticism 
and uncertainty in the answers to this question. 
Looking abroad over the world we see people striving 
here and striving there to get into this class or clique 
or association or circle, of which they have not the 
entree as yet. Some think that this is good or that 
is good or the other is good, that they as yet are ex- 
cluded from. What then is good "society .? It seems 



SOCIETY. 



53 



to me it is a very simple thing. Wliat is a good 
man ? You do not need that I shall define him. 
First, a man that has character, integrity — true, 
pure, noble. If you can add to that culture and say 
character and intelligence both, all the better. The 
more good qualities you can add to an individual the 
better. There is no mysticism about answering the 
questian as to who is a good man. Apply the same 
principle, then, to society. A good society is society 
made up of good people, — good men and good 
women. I know of no better definition than that. 
If having a skillful tailor and being gotten up in the 
most artistic fashion is not able to make a good man, 
a man that you will respect and honor and look up 
to, then why should an aggregation of a hundred or a 
thousand people faultlessly and spotlessly clothed be 
able to constitute good society } If because a man is 
rich he is not, therefore, necessarily a good man, how 
does it happen that a hundred or a thousand rich 
men, without regard to character, are able to consti- 
tute good society ? If because a man's grandfather or 
some far-off ancestor was a great man, is not good 
and satisfactory proof that he is a good man, how 
does it happen that a hundred or a thousand people 
who had distinguished ancestry are able to constitute 
good society .'* The principle seems to me an exceed- 
ingly simple one. Good society, then, is that which 
is made up of good people ; and there is no other 



54 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

good society on the face of the earth, no matter what 
it may arrogate to itself or how grand may be its 
claims. 

T/ie Law of Social Success. 

Now then let us come to discuss a little the laws 
of social success ; the relation in which we stand to 
society. The principle is embodied perfectly in the 
golden rule : ** whatsoever therefore ye would that 
men should do to you, do ye even so to them." The 
law of social relation, then, is the law of giving 
and taking — of equality; the law that you must 
in some way pay for that which 'you expect to 
receive, and that you have no right to claim some- 
thing for nothing. How common it is — it is illus- 
trated in almost every church sociable that anybody 
ever attended anywhere — for some persons to take 
themselves away from the mass of those that have 
gathered — it may be from timidity or modesty, or 
the best motive in the world — to some out-of-the-way 
corner or to sit at the side of the room near the wall 
and make not the slightest efforts themselves to con- 
tribute to the welfare and comfort and joy of the 
evening, but to simply sit and wonder why somebody 
does not put himself out for their sake, to make 
them happy, to make them have a pleasant evening. 
And they go away and say the sociable was stupid, 



SOCIETY 



55 



and it was, too, probably ; and the people, if they 
thought anything about them, as they retired thought 
that if there was nobody else there that was stupid, 
there was at least that one. 

Give and Take, 

Think for a moment of the principle that underlies 
this. You like to have somebody sing to entertain 
you. Somebody else, then, likes to have you sing to 
entertain them. You like to have someone tell an 
anecdote to make the evening pass pleasantly ; some- 
body else likes to have you tell an anecdote. You 
like to have somebody converse with you and thus 
make the evening pass pleasantly ; somebody else 
likes to have you converse with them. Whatever 
you expect, that you must endeavor to do. Suppose, 
for example, that we could have for once an ideal 
gathering ; not one single person present who had 
the slightest idea of being selfishly entertained by 
the rest, but all coming with the distinct and definite 
purpose to do what they could to make the evening 
just as pleasant as possible for everybody else. We 
would have the happiest body of people that anybody 
ever knew ; for the simple reason — and I appeal to 
your past experience if it is not true in every direc- 
tion — for the simple reason that you never in your 
lives forgot yourselves and attempted to contribute 



56 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

to the comfort and pleasure of somebody else, that 
you did not wake up afterward to find that you had 
been happy, or had passed a pleasant hour or evening. 
This is the secret of it then. You have no more 
right to go into society and expect to be entertained 
without contributing your part to the entertainment 
of the rest than you have to go into a dry goods store 
and expect a yard of cloth or a dress pattern or 
ribbon without paying for it. You may not be able 
to pay so many things as the others ; you may not be 
able to pay a wide range of scholarship, ability to 
converse on intellectual topics ; you may not be able 
to contribute a song or a story ; you may feel that 
you lack somewhat of beauty or grace, of many of 
those things that fit one for social pre-eminence and 
display ; but all of you will bear witness to the truth 
when I say that some of the finest contributions that 
are ever made to the passing of a pleasant evening 
are those that come from the warm heart, the simple 
manners, the earnest pleasant smile of one whose 
social life is simply an expression of a warm, true 
heart, a tender and loving nature. I get tired of the 
literary study of things sometimes ; I get tired even 
of singing sometimes ; I get tired of all these special 
arts by which men contribute something to the wel- 
fare and entertainment of those about them ; but 
there is always a rest, a repose, a peace, a calmness, 
a satisfaction in meeting and conversing with a true 



SOCIETY. 57 



man or a true woman who is simply that and nothing 
more. 

Doers and GriLinblers. 

You have no right, then, to find fault with any 
society of which you are a part, or on the outskirts of 
which you are hanging as no more than a fringe ; 
you have no right to find fault with it until you have 
contributed to the full what you can to make it what 
it ought to be. And when all people have done that 
there will be nothing left to find fault with. I have 
thought sometimes of a saying I heard several years 
ago at the West. It applies itself perhaps to Sunday 
school work, to church work and to things where 
there is something to be done, more distinctly and 
definitely than a social gathering, and yet it has its 
bearing here ; a saying that the world is divided into 
two parts — the people who do the work and the 
people who find fault. I have very rarely found that 
people who have been doing the best they can to 
contribute to the success of a particular movement 
are disposed to find fault with it when it goes wrong, 
because it reflects, doubtless, upon themselves. But 
the people who sit outside and want it made right, 
but will not touch it, even with their little finger, 
and who have nothing else to do, they can be very 
eloquent in finding fault with the miscarriages of 
others. This works sometimes seriously — and I 



58 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

wish you would think of it — concerning our Sunday 
school, concerning church work, in every direction. 
Before you find fault with what others are doing 
consider whether you have contributed all that you 
should toward the success of that in which you are 
engaged. 

A Charity Principle, 

But while persons must feel that it is their fault if 
they do not contribute something to society and so 
receive something in return, on the other hand there 
is a charity principle, a beneficent principle, a self- 
sacrificing principle that ought to come in ; and those 
who have social ability and conversational ability, sing- 
ing ability, power in anyway to comfort and entertain 
in their own way their fellow men, will feel that it is 
their business to pour themselves out upon those that 
are about them, as the sun does its light — upon the 
good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, the just 
and the unjust ; thus developing and calling into ac- 
tivity faculties and powers on the part of others that 
else would have been stunted and never have found 
their development. 

Limits of Acquaintance. 

As touching this matter of the law of social suc- 
cess, there is one other thought that I must bring in ; 



SOCIETY. 59 



and that is the gathering of these social aggregates 
that we find everywhere about us. I remember when 
I was in a church at the West, it began a few years 
before I went there as a little church of twenty or 
thirty members ; it was like a little family, a little 
household ; everybody knew everybody else, and felt 
perfectly at home. But the church grew. Of course 
they wanted it to grow ; but they seemed to be un- 
wilhng to take one of the inevitable results of this 
growth, and that was its getting so large that they 
could no longer have the little family circle where 
everybody would feel perfectly at home and familiar. 
I hear people occasionally say : ** A few years ago I 
knew everybody in the church ; now I look over it 
and it seems like a strange audience ; I do not know 
half of them." Perfectly natural. How could you 
expect it to be otherwise ^ Think for a moment 
before you find fault with the church and say that it 
is not social and that it is not easy to get acquainted 
in. If there is any one lady or gentleman in this 
church that should attempt to become personally ac- 
quainted with everybody else in it they would have 
to give up all their other business and devote them- 
selves exclusively to this. If you are not ready 
to pay this price then do not wonder that there are 
people here that you do not know. Remember 
that this principle of social aggregation is just as 
natural as the principle of crystallization in nature. 



6o ^IFE QUESTIONS. 

Chemical affinities come in in the realm of nature 
and bring certain peculiar kinds of qualities together, 
things that naturally belong together and have an 
affinity for each other. We find this is the law 
everywhere in the vegetable world, making grass 
here, a little shrub there, a rosebush in another place, 
here an oak, there an elm ; we find each according to 
its law. And when we come into the realm of inani- 
mate nature, we find it in the crystals. The world's 
crystals themselves, each after their own law, make 
themselves into this infinite variety, each beautiful 
after its kind. Precisely the same law must work in 
society. There are crystallizations, little aggregates 
of people that we call cliques. Is there anything 
wrong about cliques ? That depends upon another 
question as to what kind of a clique it is. If the 
people that get together into a little clique do it for 
some purely selfish purpose, or gather around some 
principle that in itself is evil, then that is evil. It is 
not because it is a clique, but because the principle of 
the aggregation is wrong. When people gather 
together and make a benevolent society, devoting 
themselves to the work of helping on and lifting up 
their fellow-men, that is a clique ; but we never think 
of calling it by any opprobrious epithet; we honor 
and admire it. You cannot wonder that people follow 
their own affinities. People gravitate together and 
find something that answers to their own natures and 



SOCIETY. 6 1 



their own qualities ; and many times people cannot 
give any account why they do it. You remember the 
old stanza : 

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, 
The reason why I cannot tell ; 
But only this I know full well, 
I do not like thee. Doctor Fell. 

That is simply the beginning and the end of it. You 
cannot find any fault with this principle ; at least you 
cannot find any fault with anybody except Him who 
has created human nature and made it what it is. 
There is only one person left in the community, so 
far as I know, who, according to the popular tradition 
and expectation, it is supposed ought to love every- 
body just alike : and that is the minister. But so far 
as my experience and observation are concerned, 
there has not been a case so conspicuously successful 
as to make us justified in believing that it will ever 
be fully realized. We cannot help loving one person 
more than another, being attracted by this one, 
repelled by that ; only we should dominate this whole 
law always by the principle of right and truth and 
justice towards our fellow-men. 

Social Obligations. 

There is another point. Have we any social obli- 
gations .-* That is, here is a man, for example, who 
is purely intellectual in his tastes ; who does not 



62 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



like general society ; who never wants to go into 
company ; he will retire by himself, he will write a 
book, he will study, he will pursue some selfish aim 
of his own. No matter what it is that takes him 
apart from his fellows, he chooses to live by himself. 
There is another type that I have in mind, that is a 
more beautiful illustration — the type of a woman 
who has found her whole love in her family ; who 
loves husband and children devotedly, and who has 
on the outer edge of this family circle simply a few 
personal friendships that are so close that they may 
be considered a part of the family itself ; who never 
makes a ceremonious call ; who never drives over 
the city in her carriage, and is glad of an opportunity 
for leaving a card instead of going through the disa- 
greeable formula of the call itself. Now have these 
persons, — the man or the woman — who thus with- 
draw themselves from society, any justification in scT 
doing.? Do they owe anything to society.? I must 
answer this yes and no ; and I will try to make clear 
the distinction I have in mind. There is not a, man 
of the earth, for that matter, who has the right to 
withdraw absolutely from their fellows. What they 
have, what they are, they owe to the struggle, the 
thought, the labor, the tears, the heart-aches, the 
achievements of men. Just as every coral island lifts 
its peaceful surface above the sea, crowned with 
grasses and flowers, and waving with trees, because 



SOCIETY. 



63 



uncounted millions have sacrificed themselves, and 
left their remains down out of sight to be taken no 
note of above ; so this beautiful social life we live 
to-day, this intellectual life, this home life, with all its 
sanctity and its beauty, we owe to the fact that down 
out of sight, reaching away into the unfathomed 
abyss of the past, have been the thoughts, the sym- 
pathies, and the struggles, and the cares, and the 
trials of men our brothers, and women our sisters, 
that we do not even know by name. This is the 
ground on which this, that we call humanity, has 
its intellectual development, its beautiful homes, as 
flowers blossoming from its central stem. You have 
no right, then, to lead a selfish life, however beautiful 
it may be. But — and here let me be understood 
again — it may be that a man is so constituted that 
by retiring to the privacy of his own study and 
writing a book, he may do for the world more than he 
could do if he lived always in the world and did not 
produce the work to which he devotes his life. It 
may be, on the other hand, that the mother who 
builds a beautiful and ideal home, a nest for all sweet 
affections and noble joys, that she is thus, by showing 
the possibility of humanity, by showing what kind of 
a home can be created by devotion and love — it may 
well be, I say, that she may make a grander contribu- 
tion to the social life of the world, than by living 
always in society and neglecting the beautiful labor 



64 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

of the ideal home. For, just as a star far off, belong- 
ing to the solar system, shines down upon and beau- 
tifies, and makes glad the earth, so home, withdrawn 
from society, far off, above all the fancy and glitter, 
casts its sweet and cheering influence and its inspiring 
example over the whole realm of society of which it 
is a constituent part. 

Vour Contribution. 

Now, then, I come to the last, and ask what we can 
do to contribute to the welfare and upbuilding of 
society. What contribution can we make to its 
thought ; how shall we make society better ; how 
shall we lift it up to make it worthy of its possibilities } 

And, in the first place, the first thing you must do 
is to be yourself, and to make yourself something 
noble and worthy ; make yourself such a man or such 
a woman that when you go into society you shall have 
added to it something of value, so that it shall be 
more when you are in it than when you are out 
of it. For, no matter what fine speeches a person 
may be capable of making, no matter how graceful 
in manner, how beautifully dressed, the contribution 
that you really do make to society is not primarily 
how you look, not primarily how you are dressed, not 
primarily the song you sing or the music you play. 
The contribution you make to society, whether you 



SOCIETY. 



65 



will or not, is primarily and first of all what you are ; 
and you cannot help it. And if you are contracted, 
if you are narrow, if you are prejudiced, if you are 
selfish, if you are mean, then the more you go into 
society the more you drag it down. If you are noble, 
and true, and pure, then you lift it up ; and you 
cannot help these influences, unspoken and unseen, 
acting upon and mingling with all the forces that con- 
stitute this social life in which you are a part. Try 
to be something distinct and definite by yourselves ; 
cultivate individuality, in other words. If I were 
capable of writing a poem I should not take it as 
much of a compliment that somebody said it had a 
Tennysonian ring, or that, it sounded like Longfellow. 
If I cannot write something that shall have my own 
ring and sound like myself, then I do not care to write 
anything at all. I would not care to be the shadow 
of the greatest man in the world. I would rather 
cause a shadow of my own, if it is ever so small. If 
you go into society and simply make number fifty, 
you have added nobody to it, except another person 
to eat the supper and be in the way. But if you go 
into society and add yourself, so that people who know 
you feel that there is somebody else here that was not 
here before you came, then you have made a contri- 
bution to society, no matter especially as to whether 
it is this kind or that. Create a quality of your own ; 
be distinct ; think your own thoughts ; stand on your 



ee LIFE QUESTIONS. 

own feet ; speak your own words, whether they seem 
to you as fine or as noble as those of others or not. 
The hope of this world is in the individuality of the 
members of which it is composed. I would not like 
to have all the flowers of the world roses even if they 
were ever so beautiful. I would have variety, I would 
have even those things by the roadside that, because 
we have not learned how beautiful they are, we still 
call weeds. I would rather have them now and then 
if I wished to make a bouquet. So add your own 
distinct and definite contributions to society. 

Men and Women. 

And now I have a word or two that I wish to say 
concerning one or two of the aspects that society takes 
on and the influences which men and women exert. 
Men have immense power to tone up and elevate the 
society of which they are a part, and to make it tend 
toward the highest and best things in the women that 
constitute the other half of society. So long as men 
and women are constituted as they are it will always 
be one of the first thoughts in their minds, and it is 
right that it should be, as to whether they are pleas- 
ing to the other half of society. It is perfectly right 
and inevitable that men should desire to please women 
and that women should desire to please men. There 
could be no society otherwise. Out of this springs 



SOCIETY. 



67 



all that is most beautiful and gracious in society. 
And now, what do I mean by that? Where comes 
in the power with men ? We find a great deal of 
fault privately, in magazine articles and in newspapers 
because women spend so much time in the mere mat- 
ter of looks and dress. Whose fault is it that they 
do ? Primarily, the fault of rrfen. Just so long as 
a beautiful dress counts more in society than anything 
else, just so long as men court the beautiful face, 
though it be only as Tennyson expresses it concern- 
ing Maud — ''icil}^ regular, splendidly null" — so long, 
I say, as a woman possessing merely fine clothes and a 
beautiful face, finds that she is able by either of these 
characteristics to be queen of society, to bring men 
to follow her as moths gather about a candle, even 
to bring them to her feet, just so long will women pay 
deference to these qualities and will lay their emphasis 
upon them, and you cannot wonder. Just so long as 
society demands that when a woman is married all 
the articles of her trousseau shall be displayed for the 
entertainment of the ladies of her acquaintance, so 
long as they care more about her many dresses and 
the cut of her train than they care about her heart or 
her brain, just so long will women emphasize face and 
dress. Those qualities which give power, success, 
mastery, are the ones on which the emphasis is laid 
by both men and women. It is perfectly natural and 
inevitable that it should be so. So soon as men show 



6S LIFE QUESTIONS. 

a higher cultivation of their own higher tastes so that 
they can see heart and character in a plain face, so 
that they can see grace and life and thought and heart 
although it be not decked and ornamented to excess, 
then these higher qualities will come to the front. It 
is the inevitable law of natural selection ; these things 
come to the front and display themselves because 
they have the right of control in them. It is man's 
fault, then, and not woman's chiefly or primarily that 
women lay the emphasis on these merely external 
and superficial things. You all know what power a 
beautiful character and life has to sculpture the face. 
Some of the very plainest looking faces I have ever 
seen, and some of the plainest dresses, I have sat 
before and bowed down to, looking into the eye and 
listening to the voice until everything except the 
womanly heart and the cultivated brain were forgot- 
ten. Emphasize these things, then, make them of 
worth in the social market and they will be brought 
to market. 

Women and Men. 

Now, on the other side, society will not be pure, 
noble and true as it ought to be until women are 
more inexorable than they are as yet in the demands 
they make upon men. If a man feels that it is dis- 
reputable for him to associate with a criminal woman, 
why should not a woman feel the. same of a criminal 



SOCIETY. 



69 



man ? Until this law cuts clear down through, and is 
equal in its reach and power, there will be no redemp- 
tion of society. How is it now ? I appeal to you if 
I have not the right to say that if a man has a fine 
figure, is good-looking, has a pleasing address, if he 
has money, if he has social standing, the chances are 
a hundred to one, that he can go into almost any 
home and pluck the fairest, the sweetest, the purest 
flower of the family, although he be rotten from 
centre to circumference and from head to foot ? So- 
ciety will not be what it ought to be until this is at 
an end. There is one thing to be said in excuse for 
it. The power that succeeds in society is the power 
that can please. A man who has no fear, who is self- 
possessed, has a pleasant address, is of course able to 
please socially ; so far it is perfectly legitimate and 
right. But there are men, thank God, by the thousand 
in the world yet who have this and something more ; 
and this something more must be emphasized before 
it will be developed. If a man who steps over the 
line of right were ostracised as a woman is, there 
would be a revolution in society in twenty years. 

Now, one last thought, for my time has gone. 
Society ga-thers itself around all sorts of centres, from 
the lowest to the highest. It may gather itself around 
the principle of simple amusement. That is all right 
as far as it goes. If it be no higher than the "light 
fantastic toe," if that be the ultimate end and aim of it 



yo LIFE QUESTIONS. 

all, within proper limits, and circumscribed as it ought 
to be, that is perfectly right. But the heart is higher 
than that. Seek to bring into your social gatherings 
the affectional element and you have elevated it a 
degree ; bring into it cultivation and thought and you 
have elevated it another degree ; bring into it char- 
acter and make that supreme and you have made 
society not only the result of nobility, and devotion, 
and morality, and religion, but you have made it the 
mightiest power to create, to lift up and to regener- 
ate the world. 



Jfourtlj Question. 

HOW MUCH MUST I WORK AND HOW MUCH MAY I PLAY ? 



Working and Playing. 

Perhaps it is hardly worth while for me to take the 
trouble to define what we mean by working and by 
playing. There is not a boy, or a girl, who practically 
does not understand completely what the distinction 
is. And yet, if we choose to analyze them for just a 
moment, so that we may see what we really mean, we 
shall find, I think, that the distinction between work- 
ing and playing is not a distinction in the thing done, 
nor in the way of doing it. It is rather a mental or 
an emotional distinction ; that is, a boy on a coasting 
expedition, sliding down hill and then hauling his sled 
up again after him, may be putting forth much more 
physical effort, really exerting himself much harder, 
than he would be in performing some task that has 
been set him by parent or teacher. But he knows 
perfectly well that the one is play and the other is 
work. If he were set to sliding down hill and hauling 
the sled up again after him as a task, when he did not 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



want to be engaged in that, but wanted to be doing 
something else, precisely the same thing which would 
be play under one set of circumstances becomes work 
in another. The distinction, then, I say, is not in the 
thing done ; it is not in the amount of effort expended. 
A prominent writer and very subtle thinker has given 
a definition like this ; he says that work is effort ex- 
pended for some ulterior object, while play is some- 
thing that you do just for the sake of doing it. This 
is true within certain limits ; but if I had time, and it 
were worth while, I should be able to point out to you 
some important exceptions. I only care, however, 
to note this as a matter of thought for you, and to 
pass on. 

Mans Nature, 

In order to find out what a man or woman ought 
to do, to find out what any being in heaven above or 
in the earth beneath ought to do, is a very simple 
matter so far as its essential principles are concerned. 
We are to find out what this being is ; the law of its 
nature ; and then we are to find out the circumstances 
in which it is placed ; the relations in which it stands. 
Every one knows at once, on glancing at a fish, that 
its life is to be in the water ; it is adapted to that life ; 
it is living out the law of its nature by following it. 
We know when we glance at a bird that its life is to 
be quite other than that of the fish ; it is adapted to 



WORK AND PLAY, 



73 



another element, and if compelled to follow the life 
of a fish it would follow it but for a moment before it 
would cease to be. And so we may take any of the 
animals, or birds, or fishes, any creature that belongs 
to the lower life of the world, and we shall find that 
the same principle will hold. Now when we come up 
to man what do we find ? We find that he shares a 
part of his nature with the fish, a part of his nature 
with the bird, a part of his nature with the wild 
animal of the forest, a part of his nature with the 
butterfly that only flits from flower to flower. But 
man has no right to be a tiger because there are 
uneHminated elements of the tiger in him ; a man has 
no right to lead the life of a butterfly because there 
are about him and in his nature as yet some of the 
elements of the life that the butterfly leads ; for the 
simple reason that he has other things, higher things, 
faculties and powers that are capable of making some- 
thing more, something broader, something deeper, 
something higher than the nature of any or all 
these. The law of man's life, then, is to be deter- 
mined by finding out what sort of a being he is, what 
he is capable of being, and what he is capable of 
becoming. And if we look for a solution to these 
questions we shall find that if not the law — for I 
shall hardly say that — we shall find at any rate that 
a law, and one of the most important laws of nature, 
is the law of labor. Man is man only by virtue of 



74 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



labor expended. Let us look at this in two or three 
directions. 

Labor and Growth. 

In the first place, if you take him simply as an 
individual, look at the faculties of which he is com- 
posed. Begin with muscle, if you please. How does 
a man develop } What is the difference between a 
little child that as yet cannot walk, that does not 
know the use of its hands,^at has not learned the 
use of its eyes, that has not learned the use of its 
feet — what is the difference between a child like 
this and a full-grown man t Primarily that which 
makes the difference is the effort that has been 
expended by the developing and the awakening of 
the faculties and powers of the child, through which 
effort, and by means of which, ihe child has de- 
veloped and grown to be a man. It is work that 
develops a man's arm ; it is work also that develops 
a man's brain, that makes the artist, that makes the 
musician, that makes the author, that makes the 
philanthropist, that makes what we call a man in 
any and every department of human life. Work, 
then, is the law of development of every one of 
our faculties and powers. The difference between 
the uneducated man and an educate d on e is simply 
work. And even genius itself, that supreme faculty 



WORK AND PLAT. 



7S 



and power which is supposed to make its possessors 
in some sense distinguished from all of their kind ; 
one of the most marked geniuses of the world has 
said, even concerning this, that genius is chiefly the 
faculty of hard work ; and those productions of 
genius that we suppose are flashed off in a moment 
of inspiration, represent years of thought and toil, 
and even agonizing struggle. Take as one typical 
illustration the magnificent poem of Faust, the 
greatest creative work of genius probably since 
Shakespeare. Goethe began this poem, dreamed 
about it, outlined it when he was a young man, and 
wrote parts of it. He finished it only when he was 
an old man. That is, this poem is the quintessence, 
the outflowering of all the magnificent life, all the 
effort of genius of him who was, perhaps, the greatest 
man of the modern world. Work, then, represents 
the development of the individual. 

Work and Civilization. 

And then when we raise the question as to what 
claims to be civilization, what will be the answer.^ 
Civilization is nothing less than transformed and 
crystallized labor. Look at the city of Boston. 
Travel over the miles and miles of our pavement and 
think of the amount of work that has transformed 
the wild country that this was before the Indians 



76 LJFE QUESTIONS. 



were driven to the West into the populous streets of 
our great city. Look at our magnificent buildings 
and think until you are weary, of laying brick upon 
brick, and carving out carefully, day after day, the 
stones that at last are lifted and fitted into the walls 
of our great structures. Think of the work repre- 
sented simply by the external life of a great city like 
Boston ; and then remember that this is only one of 
hundreds and thousands that the labor, the toil, the 
effort of man has lifted up all over the world. When 
you get inside of the buildings, then what ? Go into 
one of the school -houses ; open a grammar or a text 
book on geology or astronomy. It is a very simple 
thing ; you can buy it, perhaps, for half a dollar or a 
dollar. Children learn it in a very little while. But 
these simple formulas, and propositions, and state- 
ments of fact that are given to us to-day, they 
represent thousands of years of toil, and struggle, 
and effort, and tears, and persecution, and outlawry, 
and death on the part of our fellow men. Civilization, 
then, is simply a gigantic monument erected by and 
to the gigantic effort and toil of men. 

Work and Duty. 

And then in another direction see how this law 
appeals to us. If a man have in him the heart of a 
man, if he have in him a sympathy that reaches out 



WORK AND PLAY. 



77 



and takes hold of, and feels with the sorrows, and 
trials, and troubles of his fellow-men, if he be not 
deaf in the very highest department of his nature, he 
must feel the necessity and hear the call from every 
quarter, the call incessant, the cry that wails forth 
its moan from morning till night, and through what 
we call the still hours, even sends up its moan of 
desire, its mourning, its appeal to heaven and out 
towards man. The want of the world ; the suffering 
bodily; not only that — mentally; the heart struggles, 
the tragedies of life that grow out of the fact that 
man is only partially civilized, that he has only half 
learned to adjust himself to the relations in which he 
stands to his fellows. And then the crimes, and kin 
to these, weakness as yet not grown strong, that 
mean ignorance, that mean stress of temptation, that 
mean weakness trampled down by the crowd. 

And then higher yet, in man's spiritual nature 
there is a want, this grand uncompleted ideal of 
humanity that is not as yet in our life, a constant 
cry and appeal to his fellow for love. So that, I say, 
by as much as a man is a man, by as much as a 
woman is a woman, noble and true, by so much must 
man and woman both feel this everlasting call to 
labor, to live, to do something, to cheer one's fellows, 
to lift them up and to help them on. It seems to me 
if we will only stand for a little and think of what we 
owe to the world, of how much the past has wrought 



78 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



out for us and how all the blossoming beauty of our 
civilization represents the soil watered by tears and 
blood, a rugged soil tamed by age-long effort on the 
part of our brothers and sisters — I say, if we will 
stop and think of this, we can never, for one moment, 
think of doubting the everlasting law of labor that is 
laid upon us ; the necessity to do what we can to 
make the world easier, not only for those that are 
about us to-day, but to save our children and our 
neighbors' children from the toil and from the strug- 
gle that has been needed to lift up life to its present 
condition. It seems to me, if one declines to do his 
part, that he is like one who should stand among the 
graves of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, and 
remembering that he owes his country to those that 
sleep, — turning to dust underneath in the shapeless 
mounds, — should yet be capable of betraying the 
country they thus have purchased for him. He who 
does not recognize the law of labor that binds him to 
his fellow and makes it a part of the first moral duty 
of his life to do something to help on the world, 
seems to me to be a traitor to his kind. 

How much Labor f 

The law of labor, then, is so inexorable as this. 
But when we raise the question embodied in our 
topic, How much shall I labor, how much shall I 



WOBK AND PLAT. j^ 

work ? I can give you no hard and fast definition or 
answer. Remember the principle and you will not 
go far astray. And I cannot give you that principle 
in any shorter words than by quoting to you that old 
phrase that has become proverbial, noblesse oblige — 
ability is obligation. That is, you are under obliga- 
tion to do for the world what you can. How much 
that is you yourself must decide. There ought to be 
here no room for discouragement or depression, if, as 
Milton said, with such profound truth in that famous 
sonnet of his on his blindness, 

They also serve who only stand and wait. 

If Standing and waiting is all you can, then you 
serve your fellow men by standing and waiting. 
How many a time perhaps, we find ourselves at the 
opening of pathways leading this way and leading 
that, when we may feel obliged to hesitate and wait 
weeks and months, sometimes years, before we can 
answer the question as to what our life means. But 
beware that it is turned not into idleness. Remem- 
ber that something in the world is given to every 
man and every woman to do; something that bears 
some relation to your fellow men ; and earnestly and 
diligently seek to find what that something is, and 
then earnestly and diligently seek to perform it. 
This is the law then. You are under obligation to 
work what you can. This depends, of course, upon 



80 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

health; it depends upon natural ability; it depends 
upon circumstances ; it depends upon a hundred 
things that no one else can lay down for you as rules 
or foretell. But you yourself, with conscience for 
a guide, with the love of God in your heart and 
the love of your fellow men, need not go astray 
practically in seeking to solve the question. 

P/qy ill Nature, 

But is work all of life ? As we look over the face 
of nature we are impressed everywhere by traces of 
the playfulness, the beauty, and simple joy of the 
universe. We know, if we stop to think, that every- 
thing is moving on under the control of inexorable 
forces ; that the position of a cloudlet, for example, 
over our heads to-day, is determined by a chain of 
causes reaching back to infinitude ; that everything 
is linked together thus, and that all things work 
together, as Jesus said concerning God, **My Father 
worketh hitherto," has worked always, is working 
to-day, is engaged in his creation, building up the 
world, building up man, just as much and in precisely 
the same way as He has ever been. And yet, as 
in the spring, we lie on the grass under the trees, 
and watch the clouds float across the blue, there 
seems rest and play on the ground, and in the sky; 
and thus the heart of nature seems to speak to us. 



WORK AND PLAY 



and the leaves seem playing with the wind, without 
thought of work, or trouble, or sorrow. We speak of 
the waves playing upon the sea-shore, and the sun- 
light playing upon the hill-tops, and the beautiful 
patter of the summer rain. All these things simply 
indicate that there is in nature a certain play element 
that rejoices in the world all about us. 

P/ay hi Man. 

And then when we look at man what do we find } 
We find not only the law of work, but I believe just 
as inexorable, just as necessary, just as far-reaching, 
the law of play. Is it natural } Why, the first sign 
of life almost, the first sign of intelligence, at any 
rate, that you look for in the face of the new-born 
babe, is a smile ; and the child's nature unfolds in 
play at every step. And we find as we study human- 
ity, that from the beginning of the world, man has 
been a creature that has loved to amuse himself, that 
has loved to play just as much as he has loved to 
work. And what does this mean } What is the 
principle t Anywhere, all over the world, where you 
find the work of man, anything that he has done, no 
matter what it is, whether it is good, bad or indiffer- 
ent, whether it is beautiful or ugly, wherever you 
find the work of humanity, you find simply the 
external expression of something that is in man. 
6 



S2 ' LIFE QUESTIONS. 

For example, the church illustrates the religiousness 
of man; the schoolhouse expresses his intellectual 
nature. Everything that you find expresses some- 
thing external that is in man, and a part of him by 
nature. So the theatre, for example, expresses some- 
thing native and natural in man, or else it would not 
have lived all these years and ages. 

P/ay and Puritanism. 

But because man is naturally inclined to play, per- 
haps you will not therefore concede that this natural 
impulse is right ; at any rate there is a large amount 
of feeling in the community still, that tends to con- 
demn this play-instinct, and play-element, of men. 
As it exists here in Boston to-da}^ for example — and 
instead of going all over the world, I will get my 
illustrations from home — as it exists here in Boston 
to-day, it is a remnant and tradition of the old Puri- 
tanism that settled New England. One of the 
fundamental principles of Puritanism seems to have 
been a condemnation of amusements, as such ; looking 
upon it as evil, as essentially evil and wrong, some- 
thing not to be developed, to be trained, to be guided ; 
but something to be crushed out. They have carried 
this so far that many of you can remember illustra- 
tions from your own homes, of how father and mother 
looked upon anything that seemed frivolous and light 



irORA' AND PLAT. 



83 



in yoLir characters as an evil to be pruned off, or 
crushed out, frowned upon, treated as though it were 
the creeping in of the serpent into the garden of God 
once more, bringing of necessity its trail of evil with 
it. This principle was carried so far in England, that 
it has become the subject of taunt or ridicule. You 
will remember the saying of Mr. Macauley in his 
essay on Puritanism, where he says the Puritans 
opposed and fought against bear baiting, not so much 
because it hurt the bears, as because it gave the 
people amusement. This illustrates the extent to 
which this principle of opposition to human nature 
has been carried. Puritanism fought against play, as 
play ; against amusement, as amusement ; because 
there was a devout and stern side of life. But this 
was not a new birth in Puritanism. It has sprung 
out of one of the most wide -spread philosophical 
theories of the world that I wish just to call your 
attention to, so that you may trace it. The old doc- 
trine of dualism, of monasticism — it has been called 
by many names — the doctrine that the universe is 
divided in halves, one half good, and one half bad ; 
one half the work of the good God, the other half the 
work of a bad God. And the amusements, the 
passions, the pleasures of life, have been extensively 
held to be the work of this bad God. The whole 
body was supposed to have been created by him. 
The material world was the work of an evil principle, 



84 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

entrapping and ensnaring the soul, entangling it in 
the meshes of its materialism that it might lead it 
astray, pervert it and keep it from ascending to its 
true source, the Father in the skies. This has been, 
I say, one of the old philosophies of the world. Out 
of this kind of philosophy, as a protest against the 
extremes in the other direction, sprung the monastic 
aspect of the church. 

And let me say here, we have not done with Puri- 
tanism and monasticism. We have not done with this 
grand, stern, arduous principle when we have simply 
ridiculed or denounced it. I believe it has no meaning 
at the present time in Boston, or has very little mean- 
ing, because it is the relic of something that was once 
grand, that once had purpose in it, but which is now 
in a great measure outgrown, having no vital relation 
to the world. There was a grand meaning in Puri- 
tanism when it stood up firmly to fight against the 
licentiousness of King Charles' Court; there was a 
grand meaning in monasticism, when it stood up and 
hurled its anathemas at the amphitheatre and gladiato- 
rial shows and habits of licentiousness of the depraved 
and sinking civilization of Rome. But these were 
special uprisings of this grand instinct of man to 
meet special occasions, and they do not represent 
that which is permanent in human nature. This 
play-element of man is a perfectly natural element ; 
and the expression of it in outside means for amuse- 



WORK AND PLAT. 



85 



ment is perfectly natural and perfectly right. We 
find this confirmed when we consider that even to 
the carrying on successfully of the grand work of life 
there must be mingled with it play. It is so trite a 
truth that I need only to refer to it, that if you keep 
a muscle tense and strong for any length of time it 
becomes so weary as to be utterly incapable of exert- 
ing itself even in work; just precisely as the string 
of a musical instrument strained and held too long 
becomes incapable of expressing itself in music. 
There must be relaxation, there must be recuperation, 
there must be a place for the joyous and bright side 
of life before even the work of life can be properly 
performed. 

T/ze Underlying Principle. 

We find, then, the principle that underlies the 
whole thing, I think, when we give utterance to this 
saying that there is nothing in the universe — 
perhaps you will hardly believe me at -first, but I 
wish you to think of it and see if it is not true — 
there is nothing in the universe that is wrong of 
itself. Is killing a man wrong t That depends upon 
circumstances. It may be murder, it may be hero- 
ism. And so it makes no difference what direction 
you turn to, you will find that the principle will hold. 
There is nothing wrong in itself; so, of course, there 
is no amusement that is wrong in itself. There are 



86 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

only two ways of doing wrong. You can do wrong 
either by perverting faculties that are perfectly right 
in their natural or normal use ; or you can do wrong 
by excess in any direction. These two ways, so far 
as my . thought has led me, I believe exhaust the 
whole question of doing wrong. You can do wrong 
in either of two ways, either by perversion or excess; 
and there is no possibility of doing wrong in any 
other way. The play principle is right, and, it is 
founded in nature. 

How much Play? 

Now, then, how much shall I play, how much may 
I play 1 What is the law that shall govern us in this 
as a practical matter ? In the first place, if what I 
have said already is true, you have no right, as some 
do, to play all the time. We cannot help having, I 
think, utter contempt for that man or that woman 
who simply goes through the world looking after 
something in the way of amusement. A man edu- 
cated, a man with money and means, who simply 
withdraws into himself, or else travels over the world 
to find something that shall please him and make 
him happy — I do not care if you exalt it ever so 
highly — if a man devotes himself to art, to literature 
or to anything else ; if he has no thought or care for 
his fellow men, if he is simply amusing himself in it, 
that man is contemptible ; he is only raised a little 



WOIiK AND PLAT. 8/ 

above the other man who hangs around a corner 
grocery, hoping that somebody will invite him in 
to take a drink. In both cases the man is simply 
trying to please himself, leading an aimless and 
useless life. There are many that think themselves 
excluded from any law of obligation if they are not 
engaged in something that is gross and that is 
frowned upon by society ; but a life that is simply 
play, simply amusement, is condemned by the law of 
human nature and the relation in which we stand to 
the needs and wants of our fellow men. The woman 
in society who simply leads a butterfly existence is 
condemned by the same principle. But I have not 
yet answered how much. The principle, it seems to 
me, is embodied in one word. You have the right to 
use amusement as recreation. Analyze that word 
and see what it means. Recreation, to create over 
gain ; to renovate ; to enliven and build up the 
system again when it has been exhausted. You 
have the right not only, but you have the duty, I 
believe, to amuse yourself to the extent of recreation. 

Work as Dissipation. 

But while I have said as hard things as I have con- 
cerning the question of always playing, I am not at 
all sure but that there ought to be just as hard things 
said on the other side. While there are some that 



LIFE QUESTIONS. 



I 



lead this useless, aimless kind of life, there are hun- 
dreds and thousands, particularly in our New England 
life, that exhaust themselves and throw away the best 
part of their life, that practically commit suicide by 
neglecting the law of recreation. You have no more 
right to overwork yourself than you have to overplay 
yourself — neither work nor play is the end of life. 
The thing towards which we are aiming as a result is 
both the development of yourself and of the world ; 
and you are under the highest possible obligation to 
use both work and play so as to help on this grand 
consummation. There are men all around us work- 
ing so hard that they have no family life ; working 
so hard that they have no social life ; working so 
long that they have no time to think, to look over the 
world and see what a wonderful place this is that we 
have been born into ; that have no time simply to live. 
They are merely cogs in a machine that turn as the 
wheels turn, and that wear themselves out by over- 
work and excess of labor. If such men would work 
less and play more, they would do more work in the 
course of their lives, they would do it better, they 
would help themselves, help their families and help 
the world more efficiently than they are likely to do 
at present. We have inherited a nature that tends 
to excess in the direction of work — this old Puritan 
nature that is not yet eliminated from us; and the 
competition of the world drives us on. And I do not 



WORK AND PLAY 



89 



know for the life of me how you are going to carry 
out the advice that I give you. I don't know how I 
am to obey my own advice and practise my own 
preaching, unless we can all of us gradually bring 
ourselves into a better condition. Because we are all 
of necessity now engaged in a battle for life, and we 
must work, we must keep up, we must compete or 
fall out. But I believe that the whole system is wrong, 
and that by some means or other we ought to regu- 
late our lives so that there shall be more of the play 
element introduced into them. Play then for recrea- 
tion. Only make in your minds, and practically carry 
out in your lives, a distinction between recreation and 
dissipation, and you will be perfectly safe in dealing 
with this question. 

Pervej'sions. 

Now, let me practically ai-)ply in two or three direc- 
tions some of the principles that I have developed. 
Let me show two or three ways in which we may, 
as I think,, do wrong in our amusements. There 
are two points that I wish to speak of, and those 
two points correspond to the two ways in which I 
said it was possible for us to do wrong. You can sin 
in your amusements, in the first place, by perverting 
those amusements, by mingling them with evils that 
are no essential part of them. For example, the 
theatre. The theatre is right in itself, but you know 



90 I^I^E QUJESTIONS, 



what evil elements can creep into it, and become so 
much a part of it, as it is practically carried out in 
our city life, as to make it worthless, or worse. Take 
the matter of billiards — one of the most beautiful 
games ever invented; educating to the hand and eye, 
a matter of skill and nice discrimination, beautiful in 
itself ; but with a bar close at hand, and the element 
of betting introduced, it becomes degrading in its 
whole nature and tendency, a place and way to cor- 
rupt the young men of the city. The way to reform 
this matter is to have the amusement of billiards sep- 
arated and sifted from the evil that becomes connected 
with it. Take the billiards into your own home or 
into private clubs, into places where you can choose 
your own company, and thus control your surround- 
ings, and you will have lifted it out of everything 
that is essentially evil, and made it clean and good. 
So, take the matter of cards : cairds frowned upon as 
though there was something essentially evil in them ; 
cards driven off into the corner, where evil people 
usually get out of sight ; cards made something for- 
bidden as a special temptation to young people, 
earnest and anxious as young people always are to 
find out what you tell them they ought not to — you 
can very easily make them full of danger to young 
men. But bring the cards into your home, let the 
children see that they are only pieces of pasteboard 
printed with certain kinds of spots upon them, that 



WORK AND PLAT. 



91 



it is simply a game in which the principles of chance 
and skill are combined, eliminating and taking from 
it everything that is evil, and it becomes a perfectly 
healthful and simple amusement for your homes ; 
and you rarely find your children seeking for it in 
bad places when you allow them to have it in good. 

So, you may take dancing. Dancing in itself, the 
beautiful poetry of motion, as it has so many times 
been called ; there is nothing but beauty and grace 
about it ; so natural that even the soberest deacon 
naturally finds himself, in spite of his principles, beat- 
ing time with his foot to a dancing piece of music, 
finding his nature responding to it so that he can 
hardly control himself — perfectly natural and moral 
and right in itself, it only needs to be delivered from 
those things that are evil. I need not tell you what 
they are ; you know. 

Excess. 

And now, just a word on this other principle, the 
matter of excess. I think it is excessive amusement 
when young people, for example, go to theatre, or go 
to concert, or go to anything else,^S Q many nights in 
the week and stay so late that they are absolutely 
unfit for anything the next day. If they go five 
nights in a week, so that when Sunday comes they 
cannot possibly wake up in time for church, even if 
they want to go, so that they have not a particle of 



C)2 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

vigor or strength left for the work of the Sunday 
school, for visiting hospitals, for doing anything that 
indicates that they belong to a higher range of thought 
than that which is only fit for amusement, you know 
perfectly well that this is excessive and wrong. But 
it is not that the theatre, or the concert, or the dance 
is wrong, it is simply An excessive use of these 
things, a lack of balance and proportion in your life. 

And then, there is another way in which you can 
go to excess in these things. Excess in hours and 
excessive exertion tends to injure health. You know 
what that means, and I need not stop to enlarge upon 
it. You know if you will only think and be guided 
by reason and not by impulse, how you can avoid the 
evil and find the good. But there is one more excess 
— excessive expense, excessive outlay of money and 
means in connection with any kind of amusement. 
Remember that this is only a part of life ; and how- 
ever essential it may be, there are things higher and 
better than simple amusement ; and I feel that I am 
uttering the truth of God, when I say to you that you 
have no right to waste, as thousands do, money and 
means and power that might help lift up the world, 
simply to gratify yourself in the way of excessive 
pleasure. These principles, then, bear in mind, and 
you need not go far astray. 

The whole subject naturally ends where I began. 
Bind together at the last these loose threads of 



WOBK AND PLAY, 93 



thought at the same place where I began to unravel 
them ; and remember what you are, what kind of 
beings, what capacities lie dormant in you, what you 
might be if nobly and evenly developed ; and remem- 
ber the claims of the world upon you ; and remember 
that the grand end of life is to live worthily as men 
and women ; and that work and play are simply 
ministers to serve, to cleanse, to purify, to lift up and 
help on the manhood and the womanhood. 



WHAT IS THE TRUE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL 
CULTURE ? 

My next question is, " What is the Place of Intel- 
lectual Culture in the True Life ? " I am aware, and 
would like to suggest to you at the outset, that I am 
undertaking in a very brief compass, to say something 
about a subject that is simply immense in its propor- 
tions. I shall hardly be able in any really exhaustive 
sense to enter it ; only to walk around it, to point 
out some of its features, to suggest some things for 
your thought. 

What is Life? 

The true place in life of intellectual culture. Before 
we can settle that, we must raise and briefly answer 
the question — what do we mean when we talk about 
life ? Before you can answer as to what place culture 
bears to life, you must know what you mean by life 



INTELLECT. 



95 



itself ; that is, what is the true life. Then we can see 
in what relation to it intellectual culture stands. In 
a word the true life, as it seems to me, for man, when 
you look at the individual, is the cultivation of all his 
faculties, roundly, completely and as nobly as possi- 
ble. Man is an animal ; you must treat and develop 
his body perfectly. But he is more than that — he is 
an affectional being ; you must develop this side of 
his nature. But he is more than that — he has brain ; 
you must develop and cultivate his brain. He is 
more than that — he is a moral being; you must cul- 
tivate and develop him on this side of his being. He 
is more even than that, for the history of the world 
attests this one truth, that instinctively, naturally, 
necessarily, man being what he is, he must dream 
and think of higher powers and forces ; he must 
think of God and he must live in some relation to 
this ideal of God. Even if you ignore it, and think 
to call yourself an atheist, still that, in spite of you, 
is putting you into certain relations to this idea of 
God, as manifesting the fact that there is a religious 
side to your being. Man, then, is all this, and he 
must be developed according to that which is highest 
and best in him ; that is, he must make of himself as 
much and as nobly as he can. But man is not an 
individual simply. He is related to others about him. 
And so if he live a true life, he must not only make 
of himself the truest and finest and hio-hest, but he 



q6 life questions. 



must relate himself so to his fellow-men as that he 
may naturally assist them in a similar development 
and career. The man who consciously, earnestly, 
sincerely seeks to lead a life like that, is leading what 
I call a true life. 

Life a Problem, 

Now, then, in what relation to such a life as this 
does what we term intellectual culture stand ? After 
you have outlined your ideal, after you have decided 
what you wish to make of yourself, what point you 
wish to attain, then you have simply to place be- 
fore yourself this problem, one that it will take you 
your whole life long to solve. Life is nothing 
more nor less than an intellectual problem, just 
as much so as a question in mathematics, just as 
much so as a question in astronomy, just as much 
so as a question that a geologist attempts to solve 
in regard to the state of the earth, or the scientist 
in any direction, whatever his department may be. 
And there is no other question in the world so 
hard to solve, that you may so easily make mistakes 
in, and where mistakes are so important and far- 
reaching in their influence as they are in this. 
There is no question, then, but that you will need all 
the brain you have as an original endowment, and all 
the brain power that you can add by the broadest, 
and deepest, and highest culture. There is not, I 



INTELLECT. gy 



say, any danger but that you will need it all in order 
to get the true answer to this life problem that you 
must, after some fashion, solve. It will not be found 
by accident, this true answer. The person who goes 
blundering into life and expects to stumble on 
success, may do it once in a million times, but he is 
almost foreordained to certain failure. As well toss 
up a hat full of figures, and expect them to fall at 
your feet in the shape of a solution of a problem in 
algebra, as to expect to find out the true answer to 
life without all the study, and care, and labor, and 
thought that you can bestow upon it. 

Engine and Compass. 

And yet, intellectual culture is not all of life. It is 
even the poorest half of it, if you are going to divide 
it into two parts. A. man may be a noble man, pure, 
sweet and true in his individual life, and in relation to 
his fellow men, and yet have nothing of what ordina- 
rily is called intellectual culture. A man may be 
moderately successful in his business, and not have 
what is ordinarily called intellectual culture. And 
we had better have a true life, lived out by instinct, 
stumbled upon by accident, than to have all the 
intellectual culture in the world that is simply 
misapplied. There is no question, I suppose, that it 
is true that the greater part of the crime in the world 
7 



q8 life questions. 

is connected with ignorance. And yet, there is 
nothing in the cultivation of the intellect itself, pure 
and simple, that will necessarily make a man virtu- 
ous, or honest, or pure, or true. Goethe caught that 
idea when he represented the intellectual mightiness 
and subtlety of Mephistopheles ; a man simply .with a 
mighty brain, and no conscience, is only a humanly 
cultivated tiger, set loose among the defenceless and 
the weak in society. The one grand thing, then, the 
very foundation of a man,* and that which is the 
mightiest moving force of his life, and must be, is 
the moral quality of his being. Take an old illustra- 
tion, as good for the purpose as any. You may show 
the relation that stands between the moral faculty 
and the intellectual in man by thinking of a steam- 
ship in mid-ocean ; an engine in the hold, is the 
power that moves it somewhere, that keeps it from 
simply drifting at the mercy of wind and wave. This 
power, as related to man, is always a moral power, a 
moral, force. It is something apart from what we 
mean when we simply speak of brain. The motive 
force of life is the moral force. But what good if you 
have a hundred, or a thousand horse power engine in 
the hold of your steamer, and that is all ? If you 
have no compass, if you have no helm, if you have no 
strong hand and clear, intelHgent brain at the wheel ? 
The compass, the helm, and the man at the wheel, all 
three combined, may fairly and correctly be repre- 



INTELLECT. 



99 



sented by the intellectual culture of a man. The 
moral power will drive him — where? Somewhere; 
to a good place or a bad; up and down the ocean 
aimlessly, to a distant port or on the rocks, just as it 
happens, unless there is compass, helm, and a man at 
the wheel. And suppose you have a compass cor- 
rectly adjusted; suppose you have a helm ever so 
finely constructed ; suppose you have the most 
cultivated and skillful pilot at the wheel, then what 
if you have no engine, with its mighty moving power 
in the hold.^ you are still at the mercy of wind and 
wave. You need them both, then, and we must, for 
our purpose this morning, presuppose the existence 
of this moral force of a m_an that drives him on in 
some direction. 

Meaning of Culture. 

And now let us proceed to treat of the importance 
of this power that guides — the intellectual culture of 
a man. Intellectual culture. I want to free the last 
of these two words from the popular abuse that has 
been heaped upon it, and give you a clear conception 
of the noble and dignified meaning that we ought 
always to attach to it. There are so many people in 
society, who, just because they can read a little 
smattering of poetry, or because they have learned 
the Greek alphabet, or because they can drum very 
badly on the piano, or because they can speak a little 



100 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

French so that nobody in Paris would ever under- 
stand it ; or because of something purely superficial 
in this direction, consider themselves cultured, and 
arrogate to themselves this grand and noble word ; 
and so the word itself comes to be brought into 
universal, and as to this usage, deserved contempt. 
What do we mean by culture ? Take the analogues 
of it in other directions. It is simply the old word 
cultivation. It means that which you add to the raw 
material, in any direction, by skill and labor. Take 
a piece of crude iron ore out of the mine, smelt it, 
convert it into pig iron. You have cultivated it out 
of a lower stage into a higher. Take your piece of 
pig iron and convert it into steel. By the process of 
culture, the application of skill and labor, you have 
lifted it another grade. Take your piece of steel, and 
manufacture with it the highest, and the finest, and 
the most beautiful things that can be constructed out 
of such material. You have cultivated it still further. 
Take your piece of swamp land, drain it, cut down 
the trees that are useless there, apply your chemicals 
to the soil, turn it into a field of grain, or a garden, 
or a bit of beautiful park. You have cultivated your 
land, you have applied to it the principles of culture. 
So in any direction precisely the same illustration 
will hold. And so a man cultivates his hand when 
he learns a trade, or when he learns to play on a 
piano. He cultivates his eye when he learns to use 



INTELLECT. iqi 



the microscope. The child cultivates the foot when 
he learns to walk. You cultivate any part of your 
body; and the brain is cultivated when you develop 
the raw material of that power, and make it applica- 
ble to the great problems and affairs of life, with 
which you need intellectually to deal. Intellectual 
culture, then, means the brain made the most of, the 
brain developed, the brain cultivated, blossoming, 
bearing its finest, sweetest, and truest fruit. 

Bread-whining Problem. 

Now, then, after you have found out, as I said a 
moment ago, what the true life means, it is by the 
power of the brain, and the brain alone, that you 
must solve these practical problems of life. Let us 
look at two or three of them and see what I mean. 
In the first place remember, your friends for you, or 
you for yourself, must settle the initial problem of 
your existence. The problem is, where you will plant 
your feet in the world, what place you will stand in, 
what position you will occupy, what you will attempt 
to do, what you will make your life work ; you must 
solve first, because it is the very condition of exist- 
ence, this problem of bread winning : and it lies at 
the foundation of them all. It is just because there 
are so many men in America, so many men in the 
world, that either through their own fault, or the 



102 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

fault of society, or government, have not as yet 
applied to this the efforts of a cultured brain, that 
they do not have food. I say it is because of this, 
that there is such disaster in the social world, such 
disaster in the labor field, that there are so many 
tramps, paupers and criminals. These men that we 
call tramps, are simply the men that have tried to 
solve the problem of bread-winning, and have failed. 
They have tried to give a true answer to that ques- 
tion, like a boy trying to cipher out his first question 
in arithmetic, and they have not found the true 
answer. And the false answer is written in rags, 
and dirt, and hunger, and sorrow, and the outcast 
condition in which they hang on the brink, or sink 
into the depths of society. It needs intellectual 
culture, then, to settle this problem, as simple as it 
seems to some of us. 

Moral Problems. 

And then, next, you are faced by moral questions 
that you must answer. And here I wish to emphasize 
the huge mistake that people make concerning their 
consciences. It is always the intellect that ought to 
be cultivated ; the intellect that answers and settles 
questions of right and wrong. It is never the con- 
science, as that word is popularly used, that settles 
this question. You need brain, and cultivated brain, 
to settle it. It is no slight question. Conscience is 



INTELLECT. 103 



simply that power in you which tells you that you 
ought; it does not even attempt to answer the ques- 
tion, ought what? It simply says ought and ought 
not. It leaves you to settle the question of how to 
apply this sense of duty. It is prejudice, it is training, 
it is all sorts of things that determine the consciences 
of people to-day. And if I should take any one 
question and fling it in the midst of you, I should 
split you all into parties, probably, concerning it, as 
to whether it was right or wrong. Your conscience 
does not settle that question for you. It is intelli- 
gence that settles it; it is judgment; it is study of 
the past history of the world ; it is looking over the 
attempts that have been made to settle this question 
before, to find out the results, practically, among men, 
of certain courses of action, this way and that. The 
result that is good, conscience ought to approve ; the 
result that is bad, conscience ought to disapprove. 
But it is intellect, and the cultured intellect, that must 
find out whether these things are bad or good, or 
whether these particular plans shall work out bad or 
good in society ; whether this particular drift and 
movement of men shall issue in light or darkness, in 
happiness or misery, in right or wrong. 

Religious Problems. 
And then there come up the religious questions 



104 ^^^^ QUESTIONS. 

of the world for solution. And here, again, let me 
echo — and I wish I could echo and re-echo it all over 
America — the idea that no man has any right to his 
religious opinions simply because he chooses to call 
them his. You have no right to cling to them because 
you love them, any more than a family that is living 
in a particular locality has a right to stay there be- 
cause they love the place, and because they have 
become accustomed to the house and the surround- 
ings, even though they have discovered that it would 
be at the cost of the health and life of all the children 
and all the friends. A man, to find out what his 
religion ought to be, must study, and he must think ; 
he mu-st know what religious experiments have been 
tried, and whether they have succeeded or failed; 
whether they have helped men up or helped them 
down. And he ought to be able to look over the 
world to-day and find out what are the great religious 
forces and movements at work. Here is a form of 
religion. If the principles on which it is founded and 
its practical power were only worked out in society, 
what kind of society would it make ? Would it make 
men better or worse ? Would it help them up or 
down } I say you must, before you can answer this 
question of what your religious opinions ought to be, 
and with what religious movement you ought to cast 
in your lot, what religious power you ought to help 
on, you must be able to answer the question as to 



INTELLECT. 



[05 



what the religious experience of the world has been. 
Take, for example, the Catholic Church. Is it capable 
of solving the great problems of the world that face 
us to-day, and that will face us in the future } Take 
the Evangelical Protestant Church. Is it founded on 
righteousness and on truth, and if carried out to its 
logical conclusion will it make the world better or 
worse } It is by study like this that you must settle 
the question as to what your religious opinions ought 
to be ; and you must not hold on to this opinion, or 
that, simply because you love it. You have no busi- 
ness to love that which is not for the welfare of your 
fellow-men. You must study and think, and so find 
out that which represents God's truth for to-day and 
to-morrow, and stand by that. 

Social Problems. 

And then there are social problems. I need not 
enlarge upon them to tell you what they are ; they 
are all about us, problems that need study, that need 
thought. Why, good nature, a loving heart, a tender 
conscience, these have not the power to settle the 
questions of suffrage, education, poverty and crime. 
They stand in no sort of relation to the settlement of 
questions like these. When a person is simply gov- 
erned by impulse, by good nature, by good feeling, 
unless he have a clear brain and have studied, how 



I06 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



can he know what will be the probable issue of a 
particular action in which he engages ? He may be 
doing as much mischief as good. And many a time 
it has proved in the history of the past, that the 
courses of action which men have lovingly, nobly 
and generously entered upon have ended in disaster 
and evil, all for lack of intelligence, for lack of wit, 
and thought, and reading, and study. 

Political Problems. 

And then the same is true in regard to our political 
life. Most men are Republican or Democrat, or 
whatever it may be, just because their father was so, 
or because df the newspaper that they read, never 
looking at anything said on the other side ; or 
because of prejudice, or because they became one or 
the other twenty years ago and have not waked up 
to the fact that, possibly, the old problems that 
divided them are all worn out and foregone, and that 
new problems are pressing and cannot be decided in 
the old way. You have no right to remain Democrat 
or Republican beyond another election, simply be- 
cause you were one at the last election. These 
things involve problems of right and wrong, of good 
government, of principle, of humanity, of righteous- 
ness, of truth. And above and beyond all ideas of 
loyalty to this or that party, beyond all ideas of 



INTELLECT. 



107 



associations, of friendship, and love for names and 
traditions, there stands in the face of every clear- 
headed, honest-hearted man, the outline and image of 
God's truth, which is the truth of human rights and 
human destinies. And it is your duty to see that 
and watch for the lifted finger and go wherever it 
points, whether it be with your old traditions and old 
ideas or against them. 

Intelligence Settles Them. 

All these things, then, subordinate to the question 
of the true life and making up the great practical 
problems of the world, are questions that must be 
settled by intelligence, by intellectual culture, as that 
word is used in its broadest and deepest sense. 

Having, then, given this simple outline treatment, 
I must turn now to the second part of my subject, 
which concerns itself with that which is ordinarily 
called literature, and which is popularly regarded as 
almost the only thing that is meant when we speak 
of intellectual culture. I refer to books, to the read- 
ing, to the literature of the world. And here again I 
must only outline the grand, great thoughts that 
I have in mind, and that might detain me if I could 
only dwell upon them for an hour. 

Books and Memory. 

In the first place, on this subject of books, just try 



I08 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

to imagine for a moment the debt of the world to the 
books of the world ; conceive, if you can, for an 
instant, all the libraries of the world annihilated — 
every book on the face of the earth blotted out — 
what a world, what a life would it leave for us ! I 
can compare it to nothing better than to a man forty or 
fifty years of age, who should be suddenly, by some sort 
of stroke upon the brain, deprived at once of all mem- 
ory of his past life ; perfectly well and strong in every 
other respect ; a fully developed brain, standing in the 
midst of a great waste of years that are blank. He 
w,ould not know himself; he would not understand 
where he came from, what he was, or what was the 
tendency and drift of his life. Just as this memory 
of ours stands in relation to the past life behind us — 
to yesterday, to last year, to the friends that we have 
associated with, to the experience we have gone 
through, to the lessons we have learned, to the hard- 
ships we have borne, to the triumphs and failures of 
the past, and takes us away back to childhood and its 
simple plays and companionships, and sets us again 
on father's knee, and lets us kneel at mother's lap, 
and teaches us the cradle of circumstances and the 
kind of love in which we were wrought, and out of 
which we were born — just, I say, as this memory 
does this for the individual, so the books and litera- 
ture of the world stand related to the life of the 
grand individual, humanity, man. The literature of 



INTELLECT. J09 



the world is the world's memory, the world's expe- 
rience, the world's triumphs, the world's failures. It 
teaches us where we came from ; it teaches us the 
paths we have travelled, the thoughts we have had 
in the world, and the tendency of those courses of 
thought. It teaches us the drift of things and which 
way we are going. 

Stand at St. Louis, if you please, on the banks of 
the Mississippi River ; and if the upper Mississippi 
were a perfect blank to you, if you had not the 
slightest idea whether it came from the north, south 
east or west, or how long it had been coming, you 
could have no possible conception of the river there, 
or which way it was likely to go. But if you had 
traced it from its source to St. Louis, then, practi- 
cally, you know the rest, for you have got the general 
trend and drift of the mighty stream and know which 
way it is tending. And so we, as we go back and 
study Egypt, and study Assyria, and study the old 
Sanscrit of India, the bibles of the ages, the litera- 
ture of the past, we find out where humanity came 
from ; we find out by what paths it has come, and 
where it stands to-day ; and we can reasonably fore- 
cast the future and know what humanity probably will 
be in the ages that are to come. 

Are Books Practical? 

People sometimes talk about Darwin and Spencer, 



no LIFE QUESTIONS. 

the geologists, and Wallace the naturalist, these men 
that are studying these problems that concern the 
very beginning of the world, as though they were not 
practical, as though they did not deal with live ques- 
tions. Why, they are the livest questions in the 
world. Here is a man who has found out that in 
some other continent or far off land from which his 
ancestors came, there is a large property that pos- 
sibly he may inherit. Does it not mean anything to 
him, then, to trace his genealogy, to find out where 
he was born, to find out by what paths the line of 
descent has travelled, and whether it comes to him. 
Why, when Darwin and those men shall have settled 
some of these questions that constitute the books and 
literature of the present day, we shall find out where 
man came from, and then we shall know what he is, 
and what he may reasonably expect to inherit in the 
future. 

W/tat to Read. 

Pass rapidly from that to another point. What 
ought a man to read first — what books .^ In the 
first place, a man ought to consider the literature of 
the world as simply a great store-house of tools or 
weapons, into which he is going to equip himself for 
the special life that he is to lead. That is, a lawyer 
must read and study law ; a merchant his business ; 
the doctor his, and the farmer his. And so every 



INTELLECT. 1 1 1 



man must go and equip himself. It is not the man 
who has read the most who is the best equipped. 
You may take a carpenter and let him stretch out 
his arms, and you may pile them full of tools, and 
just because he has so many of them he is utterly 
unfitted to do any work. When David put on the 
armor of Saul he found it so cumbrous and heavy 
that he could not wear it. He could not fight with 
that armor. He was too much armed. It was all 
well enough for Saul, but give David his sling and 
his little smooth stones from the brook. So a man 
must first arm and equip himself to do the particular 
work in which he is to engage. 

Idealizing the Real. 

But there is another thing in which it seems to me 
business men lose more than they are ever aware of, 
.and that is for lack of idealizing the business in 
which they are engaged. What do I mean by that } 
I mean, suppose you are a druggist, that you should 
not simply find out how much a particular drug costs 
at wholesale when you buy it, and then how much 
more you can get for it by the pound or by the ounce 
when you sell it again ; that is, merely make it a 
money -making business. Let the druggist read 
something outside of what really contributes to 
making money ; know his business ideally ; where 



112 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

the drugs and the elements of them come from ; 
what they are chemically ; where they grow ; by what 
process they have come to be as they are. And so 
the banker, the merchant in any department, and 
the lawyer. Read outside of that which simply can 
be coined into coppers, so as to enlarge upon and 
idealize your business and make it beautiful beyond 
its simple use. 

Time to Read. 

And then every man, it seems to me, should do 
something in his reading beyond even this. Men 
tell me they have no time to read. I do not like to 
contradict people, but I do not believe a word of it. 
There is not a man who has reached the age of forty 
or fifty years, who has not had time to read all the 
truly great books in the world. Suppose you read 
only one book a year. Take such a little book as 
Dana's Geological Story Briefly Told. There is not 
a man here who could not read it in the time that he 
spends over the useless parts of his newspaper in 
three months. ^ And yet it opens to him a stretch 
of past history clear back, not only to the begin- 
ning of this planet, but into the distant nebulae 
beyond — opens up grand avenues of thought, and 
life, and being, that he does not dream of. I was 
talking with a merchant the other day, who had 
retired from business, and I was particularly pleased 



INTELLECT. j 1 3 



with one thing he told me. He said, " I don't want 
for resources, for I have done what most merchants, 
so far as my acquaintance with them is concerned, 
do not do. I have compelled myself always to take 
time to read and to think. My business has not 
suffered for it. And now, all this world that I have 
created for myself by my thinking and reading, is 
open to me to enter, to live in, to enjoy myself in.'^ 
Just this is the reason why most merchants can 
never, with any comfort, retire from business. They 
have gone through life so absorbed in business that 
they simply and absolutely know nothing else, and 
can do nothing else. That is, they have made them- 
selves simply machines to perform a particular piece 
of work ; and if they stop doing that, they have got 
to stop doing everything. Be a man beyond the 
bread-winning ; both sides of it, all around it. 

I said a moment ago, and I wish to repeat it, that 
you can, every one of you, if you will, read all the 
great books of the world. If you go into a library, 
say of ten thousand volumes — which is only a small 
one — and then look at some of the great libraries that 
reach up into the thousands and hundreds of thou- 
sands, it seems an everlasting work to read anything. 
But the most of these books are only fragments. 
The great books of the world, those that let you into 
the grand secrets of the world's thought and life, I 
can count on my fingers by not going over them 
8 



114 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

more than twice. By reading one of them a year 
you can become acquainted with the whole of them 
in any ordinary business life. 

Mental Atmosphere. 

Another point : the soil that is about your house, 
the exhalations from it, the air you breathe and the 
food you eat, make you what you are physically. 
And so the intellectual soil in which you grow, the 
exhalations from it, the literary air that you breathe, 
the books that you read, the mental pabulum with 
which you fill yourself, these make you mentally and 
morally. Then beware that you read good books, 
that you eat mentally good food — that is what it 
means. For there are thousands of people who admit 
into their homes and into intimate association with 
the mental and moral life of their children, books of 
suph a character, that if they should only creep out of 
their covers and get into coats and hats, they would 
be incontinently kicked into the streets. People asso- 
ciate in literature with that which is vile and mean 
and contemptible, that which is weak — which is the 
next worse vice in a book — where they would not 
think of associating with people who had a character 
like it. What is it that makes a good man } Moral 
qualities make a good man. It does not make a great 
man, because a great man needs brain and thought 



INTELLECT, j 1 5 



superadded to moral qualities. But a good book 
needs something beside moral character ; it needs 
moral character and it needs intellectual character. 
And it is not worth your while to waste your time over 
a book that has not something of power in it. A book 
that was not, when it was written, inspired by the life 
of the writer, never can inspire you. A book that 
does not come out of an elevated mental and moral 
birth cannot elevate and lift up your life. A book, 
then, needs to be both good and great to be worthy 
of your attention. It needs to be a book that has 
life in it, and power, and thought, and suggestion. 

The Society of Books. 

Think for a minute what grand company is open 
to all. I talked to you a little while ago about socie- 
ty. It is very difficult for us sometimes to get into 
what we call the best society here in Boston or New 
York. But think what a grand society is open to 
every man that chooses to enter it in the literature of 
the world. In your little room — no matter if it is a 
small room, if it is a corner in the sitting-room, if it 
is a little place that you dignify by the name of libra- 
ry, no matter if it is a fourth-story chamber and small 
and dingy at that — old Homer is not ashamed to 
come to you and sing his immortal song. You can 
open the door and Dante will come in, walking with 



Il6 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

that sad and downcast face and air that in his. old 
a^e, after his outcast life, made the children, as they 
looked at him, stare and say, *' There is the man that 
has been in hell." Goethe will come with all his wis- 
dom. The grave and simple Shakspeare bringing 
the grand train of all his imaginary creations — more 
real than most men in flesh and blood. Milton will 
open to you his grand conception of heaven and hell 
— a whole universe inside of two covers. Charles 
Lamb will sit and chat with you in his beautiful, sim- 
ple, loving, child -like essays. You can invite an 
astronomer, and while you dream your waking dream 
under his guidance, travel to the moon and from 
planet to planet, until you stand on the uttermost 
verge of this solar system ; and then, with one bold 
leap of your fancy, to the stars so far away that their 
light has been thousands of years in travelling to the 
earth ; standing thus at the centre of this vast cosmos 
and reading the secrets of the universe. With a 
geologist you may travel back and down and learn 
how the earth has grown. This grandest company 
you can keep, if you will, in books." And remember 
that these mental associations make you quite as 
much as the men and women you associate with — 
perhaps more. There are characters in Dickens, 
there are characters of the great novelists and drama- 
tists of the world, that are more vitally real in their 
power and influence over you than the men you shake 



INTELLECT. 



117 



hands with on the street. For you do not simply see 
their outside, you are let into the secrets of heart and 
brain, reading the motives that have made them what 
they are. 

Books Broaden Men. 

I had intended to speak of the power of books to 
broaden men, to bring them into sympathy with 
other schools and styles of thought. Why, there are 
people that read nothing but the Bible. Grand book, 
properly treated, as it is ; but until they have read 
other bibles, until they have studied it as a literature, 
and seen how it grows, and by what process it has 
come to be what it is, they can never understand it. 
It is a sealed book to them until they borrow the 
keys of other literatures and other religions with 
which to open it. Men are unjust, and bigoted, and 
unkind, simply for lack of this intellectual culture 
that shall bring them into sympathy with the thoughts 
of other lands and other worlds. Do you suppose 
we should be troubled with the Chinese question, 
to-day, if the ordinary people were familiar with 
Chinese thought and Chinese modes of life t What 
does it mean that we can be unkind and hard on this 
and other nations, and call them flippantly and sneer- 
ingly foreigners and outsiders 1 It means simply 
that we lack sympathy for them, that we do not 
understand them, that we have not thought and read. 



Il8 LJFE QUESTIONS. 



Books as Recreation. 

And now for my last thought, and a brief one it 
must be. Use literature simply as play, when you 
have earned the right. There is nothing I prize so 
much as I do my books, outside of my duties and my 
human relations. When I am tired I can pick up a 
book and make a tour in Central Asia, in the Pacific 
islands, among the ice fields of the North. I can sit 
for a while under palm trees in tropical climes; I 
can see the glance and gleam of beautiful foliage 
through the trees, and hear marvellous songs from 
birds I have never seen. Take excursions under the 
guidance of your books, and go off for a while out 
of the weary world of toil, and rest. 

But the one grand thing, as I said at the outset, is 
life; and the bearing of this problem of life on all 
these things is the important matter. Whatever 
helps you in books, or reading, or literary culture, to 
live a broader or nobler life, is God-sent and God- 
blessed. Whatever hinders or drags you down is 
inspired, not from above, but from below. Make all 
things, then, help on a true, a pure, and a noble life. 



SHALL I TRY TO BE RICH. 

Youth a?id Dreams. 

Spring is the time for dreams. The tender skies, 
the bursting buds, the patches of green here and 
there, have in them suggestions of infinite visions. 
If one isn't touched by it, it is because sensibility 
has decayed. And the morning earth and sky — how 
different are they from the sober, white light of noon, 
or the hour when twilight shadows gather ! To a 
full, flushing vitality, almost anything seems possible 
in the morning. The early morning means poetry 
and hope. And youth is both mgrning and spring 
in one. What wonder, then, if young men and 
young women dream } Then they stand on moun- 
tain tops, and all the kingdoms of the world and the 
glory of them lie spread out at their feet. Their 
cloudy fancies are palaces ; and to scale the heavens 
and find them realities seems an easy task. And 
who would have it otherwise } Let the mountain 
brook babble and laugh and dash itself into feathery 



I20 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

spray ; it will flow deeply and turn mill wheels quietly 
enough by-and-by. Every healthy, vigorous young 
person, when starting out into the world, though for 
a time pillowed on hard stones, like Jacob, is sure, 
like him, to dream of opening heavens, of ladders 
reaching to the sky, and of angels ascending and 
descending. It is easy enough to smile at these 
"great expectations." But though it is too true that 
most of such visions fade, yet I do not believe any 
one ever achieved much who did not dream of great 
things. Imagination lures us on, and we turn into 
fact as many of its bright forms as we can. 

Aft Earthly Paradise. 

And it is a principle true of all visions that, how- 
ever strange or wonderful they may be, they are all 
made up of combinations of common, human, earthly 
things. You may dream of a human -headed lion 
with wings ; it is a creature no one ever saw except 
in vision ; but we have all seen the head, the lion and 
the wings — the parts of which it is composed. Even 
the Revelator's dream of the city of God coming 
down out of heaven was made up of the real earthly 
factors of gold, and jewels, and glass, and trees, and 
rivers, and light. You cannot expect the young man, 
then, to dream of anything more ethereal or spiritual. 
He will dream of a paradise indeed; but if he is 



WEALTH. 121 



healthy and human, his paradise will be on the 
ground, and all its glory will be constructed of earthly 
and human materials. 

Let us take our place by his side for a little as he 
stands on the boundary line that separates the boy 
from the man. He is looking up the long vista of 
years that seems to open almost endless reaches into 
the unexplored regions and possibilities of manhood. 
To his fancy the changing clouds of the future take 
on all the varying shapes of his grand ambitions. 

T/ie Dream of Home. 

He sees a home. No man is naturally a vagabond. 
I do not believe the healthy young man ever lived 
whose fancy looked forward and painted on the 
horizon of the future, as the goal and spring of his high 
hopes, a bachelor boarding-house. Young men do 
not dream about nor get enthusiastic over empty 
rooms. If a man finds himself at forty a forlorn and 
lonely bachelor, you may be sure it was not because 
he planned for and intended it. Whatever may be 
true of those who marry, you may be quite sure 
there is a hidden tragedy somewhere in the history 
of those who do not. Nature is not thwarted with- 
out a cause. 

The young man then dreams of a home. And of 
course he dreams of a beautiful one. It is broad and 



122 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

open and free. The wide floors are soft with carpets. 
The corners and halls and stairways are ornamented 
with statuary and reminiscences of far-off lands. 
The walls are hung with pictures. And in the midst 
of all, that for which it exists, and which constitutes 
its soul and gives it meaning, there stand wife and 
child, rich in their own fair beauty and the robing of 
beautiful garments. 

And as the young man gazes on his dream, he says, 
**To realize this, I must have money." Money is the 
condition of bringing his vision out of the clouds and 
making it rest upon the ground so that he can enter 
it with his material feet. Is he not justified, then, in 
wishing to become rich "i I believe he is ; for I think 
everyone should desire and seek for as beautiful a 
home as he can build. 

The Dream of Position. 

But, looking up the dreamland vista of years, he 
sees another vision. It is one of the primal instincts 
of human nature to desire the good opinion, the 
esteem, the admiration of our fellow men. It fre- 
quently degenerates into snobbery, the wish to exult 
over those below us, to see them turn yellow and 
green with envy and jealousy and spite because of 
our superior good fortune. But it is healthy and 
noble to desire that others should think well of us ; 



WEALTH. 123 



and to attain such a position that men will look to us 
for guidance, for sympathy and help. Every young 
man, then, naturally and rightly looks forward to the 
attainment of social position. And, in this country, 
where there is no hereditary rank, the making of 
money looks like the straightest and simplest way of 
gaining such position. He sees that the man of 
wealth is immediately lifted up on a pedestal of pop- 
ular respect and favor. And, unless he is made of 
finer stuff than that which constitutes the grain of our 
common human nature, he will strike at once for this 
readiest means of social ascent, without waiting long 
to find out if there is a better way. 

T/ie Political Dream. 

And then there is the dream of political place and 
power. And, as things are to-day in our republic, he 
will not study the problem long before he will con- 
clude that money is a stronger political force than 
character or brains. Most official doors will open 
their locks at the touch of a golden key. He will 
see senators at Washington whose sole claim to 
honor and power would appear to be a Pacific Slope 
bonanza. And he will notice that railroad magnates 
can carry whole legislatures about in their pockets. 
Here in Massachusetts he might discover that the 
one man who is hungriest for the governor's chair is 



24 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



more to be feared because of his plethoric bank 
account than for either his tongue, his shrewdness or 
his learning. 

Is it strange, then, that his dream shows him that 
the foundations of his political temple are constructed 
of gold and precious stones ? The stairways in his 
vision are naturally gilded. 

T/ze Dream of Travel. 

Another dream in the hearts of us all in these days 
is a picture of foreign travel. The Bible has been 
familiar to us from childhood ; and across its fields 
walk saintly and heroic forms in foreign costumes 
and with foreign air. Strange rivers flow across its 
landscapes, and strange mountains lift themselves in 
its far-off atmosphere. Our Latin and Greek have 
made Athens and Rome a part of our fancy world. 
The myth-haunted Rhine winds through a land of 
poetry and romance. Paris is a fairy city to one who 
has never visited it. And England, to an American, 
is like a dream of the old home. Sometime we all 
think we will realize these scenes. We will really 
walk in these wonderlands. The "Arabian Nights" 
tells us of the magic tapestry, on which, if one sat 
and wished, he was instantly carried wherever he 
desired to be. Our magic tapestry is woven of 
yellow gold. With a gold piece' in our hand, all 



WEALTH. 



25 



lands, and museums, and picture galleries, and pal- 
aces, fly open at our approach and give us cordial 
welcome. 

Again, then, I ask, is it any wonder that young 
men say to themselves, " I will seek out the path 
that leads to wealth ? " 

Gold ''the SttLJf that Dreams are Made of'\ 

And, in general, the young man's dream of happi- 
ness is almost always one for the realization of which 
gold is a prime condition. Houses, and lands, and 
horses, and pictures, and works of art, and libraries, 
and society, and travel — even if he have no ignoble 
dreams — these are things that cost, and that only 
value can buy. And if our dreams are of education 
and a literary, scientific, and philanthropic career, 
still, again, money is sorely needed to enable one to 
get on toward the goal. 

The young man at first naturally looks outward, 
and only appreciates at its full value tangible things 
and tangible pleasures such as money is able to pro- 
cure. It is only later, if at all, that he enters the 
inner realms of thought and feeling, where the soul 
hides away her treasures that cannot be weighed in 
scales, and that cannot be measured in dollars. It is 
natural, then, that the temple of human happiness 
should appear to his dreams as gilded, and that the 



126 LIFE QUESTIONS, 



god of happiness should seem to be Plutus, the god 
of wealth. 

Wealth a Good Thing, 

And — it is time for the pulpit to own it frankly — 
wealth is a good thing. Or, to speak with precise 
accuracy of thought and language, wealth in itself 
cannot be said to be either good or evil. It is simply 
force ; and, like the lightning, or the sunlight, or the 
ocean, it withers or nourishes, smites or runs errands 
for us, devastates or fertilizes accordingly as it is 
understood or used. If it is not good in itself, it is 
the condition of almost all good. It is the lever by 
which the race has been lifted from barbarism to 
civilization. So long as the race could do nothing 
but barely live, man was of necessity only an animal 
who hunted and fought for his prey, hungrily devoured 
it, and then, like a gorged tiger, slept. When the 
race began to think, and plan, and save for to-morrow, 
it first began to be human. And there is not a single 
feature of our civilization to-day that has not sprung 
out of money, and that does not depend on money 
for its continuance. 

Evils of Poverty. 

And, on the other hand, more of the crime, and 
sin, and sorrow of the world than I can now stay to 



WEALTH. 



127 



point out, spring, like poisonous weeds, out of the 
dark, tear-watered and blood-wet soil of poverty. 
" Blessed are the poor ? " No ; as a general thing, 
cursed are the poor ! So long as a man can get 
honest bread, he is not, in the worst sense, poor. 
But how many there are who cannot. How many 
steal for a piece of bread. How many a poor girl 
has sold her virtue to appease the pangs of her 
hunger. How much misery did Hood give pathetic 



utterance to in his famous ** Song of the Shirt " — 

" O, God, that bread should be so dear, 
And flesh and blood so cheap I " 

How many generous plans, and brilliant hopes, and 
noble aspirations have died in bud for lack of a little 
sunshine of prosperity. Of how many lives of unful- 
filled promise did Gray sing in his elegy when he 
said — 

" Chill penury repressed their noble rage, 
And froze the genial current of the soul." 

It is not an evil thing when a man has to work 
hard and struggle to get on ; but it is an evil, and a 
bitter one, when he utterly fails to get on, notwith- 
standing his struggle. 

Wealth sometimes too Dear. 

But, while it is true that money is not only a 
proper object of search, but is even a necessary 



128 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

condition of almost all that is best in our civilization, 
still it is possible to buy it at too high a price. Many 
things are desirable that yet one cannot afford to buy. 
And there are some things you cannot afford to pay, 
even for money. The old proverb-writer says, and 
says with wondrous subtlety and wisdom, '' There is 
that scattereth and yet increaseth ; and there is that 
withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to pov- 
erty." A man may pay out so large a part of his 
manhood for money that when he has got the money 
he is an exceedingly poor and small type of man. 

Let us, then, look at a few things that one cannot 
afford to pay, even for the grand prize of wealth. 

End higher than ' Me arts. 

You cannot afford to pay the price of sacrificing 
the end to the means. 

A hill of gold, for its own sake and as an end in 
itself, is of no more worth than a hill of pudding- 
stone. Money is not a home, nor social position, nor 
political power, nor travel, nor art, nor science, nor 
good, nor happiness in any form. A hundred acres 
of soil are not wheat, nor corn, nor flowers, nor trees 
— neither a garden nor a park. It is simply the raw 
material, out of which these may be produced ; the 
condition from which these may be developed. But 
the land unused, uncultivated, unproducti\ie, is not 



WEALTH. 



129 



worth its taxes. So a heap of money is not wealth, 
well-being, good. It is only the soil in which fine 
things may be made to grow; it is the condition of 
infinite uses, if only one knows how to use. 

This, abstractly stated, is the general principle, 
that the further points I make will serve to illustrate. 

Honesty better than Money. 

You cannot afford to buy money at the price of 
honesty. 

A rich man is made up of two factors, though it is 
a popular fallacy that he can be complete with only 
one. A rich man is not only rich, he is also a man. 
But he who buys the riches at the price of his honesty 
has ceased to be a man, and is only rich. Is this 
language too strong } Look and see. Honesty, 
integrity, is the very core, heart, centre, prime princi- 
ple, foundation-stone of manhood. There is no man, 
in the true, high sense of the word, without it. What- 
ever high human society exists on earth exists by 
virtue of what there is of honesty, integrity. This is 
the one bond that holds the world together. Just 
think a moment. There is a force that we name the 
centripetal, that holds the world together. There is 
another force that we name centrifugal, that tends to 
fling off its parts into space. If the centripetal were 
not in the majority the old earth would burst like a 

9 



130 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

soap-bubble, and vanish like a wreck at sea, scatter- 
ing its fragments over the infinite deep. Now, the 
force that holds together our human world of men 
and women is so much of mutual trust as we have in 
each other's truth and honesty. Take this all away, 
and civilization would burst in fragments like an 
exploded planet. The lack of honesty is the cause 
of all the disorder that exists. That there is any 
society at all is because so large an amount of hon- 
esty exists ; and society advances just in proportion 
as the world grows in integrity. He, then, who 
becomes dishonest has ceased to be on the side of 
humanity, is an enemy of and a traitor to the race. 
He is not man ; he is anti-man. He has forfeited 
that by which the world lives : and is self-exiled from 
what is the noblest quality of his kind. 

To be a rich man, then, you must not only be rich, 
but be a man. And man, in its highest sense, means 
honesty. Do I not say well, then, when I assert that, 
for the sake of money, you cannot afford to pay so 
high a price as honesty ? 

And yet, to what an awful strain of temptation is a 
young man submitted, when he sees money, itself, 
itself and alone, crowned with honor and placed on a 
throne of power and influence, while the man who 
clutches it is only a rotten-hearted shell. 



WEALTH. 131 



Home better than Money. 

Another thing you cannot afford to pay for money, 
is home. 

More or less of money is needed to create an ideal 
home; but money alone can not do it. When you 
have bought a house, and furnished it richly, and put 
your wife and children in it, you have not necessarily 
created a home. A pile of roots and trunk and 
branches and leaves is not necessarily a tree. Order, 
arrangement after an ideal pattern, and then, above 
all, life — these are required to make a tree. So a pile 
of things isn't a house; it is essentially a spirit, a life. 
A house without a soul is not a home, any more than 
a body without a soul is a man ; it is only a corpse. 

You must put your soul, then, the sweetest flavor 
and essence of your life, into the house before it can 
be called a home. And if a body be dead, it does not 
put life into it to dress it out sumptuously. So a 
costly house and luxurious furnishings are no substi- 
tutes for soul in the home. 

But such a mistake as this — if my observation be 
not at fault — is not at all an uncommon one. 

And in another way men make a disastrous sacri- 
fice. Forgetting that money is only a means to the 
making of a home — this is one of the highest ends 
of every true life — they become so absorbed in 



132 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



money-getting that they leave no time for anything 
like home life. As though one should lay up money 
for the express purpose of taking a journey, and then 
get so busy about getting ready as never to go. I 
beseech you not to turn home into a restaurant and a 
sleeping-bunk ; spending all your leisure somewhere 
else, and going home only when "all the other places 
are shut up." 

Culture better than Money. 

Again, heart culture and head culture are too 
great a price to pay for wealth. 

I am aware that money is a needful condition to 
one of these, if not to both; and yet money is not 
good enough to take the place of either. The end of 
life, for this world, is living; and living, in any true 
sense of the word, includes love and thought. Living 
means an open and cultivated ear that can bring one 
into vital contact with the music, the beautiful sounds 
of the world; making one capable of simple, pure 
human joy in the murmur of sea-waves, the sough of 
winds in tree-tops, the bird-songs, the child-laughter, 
the happy-insect hum, the hurly-burly of the world's 
rushing life. Living means an open eye that can stop 
to notice the glory in sky-tints and cloud pictures, 
the changing sheen of waters, the color of a rose, the 
blush of a peach, the outline of a beautiful face, the 
deep heaven of a loving eye, as well as the outlines 



WEALTH. 133 



and forms and shadings of landscapes, and mountains, 
and pictures, and marbles. Living means an open 
heart that, like an yEolian harp breathed on by the 
winds, is responsive to every v^hisper of human life 
or fortune, and echoes back in sympathy all the 
moods of human hope or fear. Living means a brain 
that can think ; that, unlike the moles that burrow in 
the ground, climbs intellectual heights, and ** looks 
before and after;" that asks questions of the universe, 
that considers, and is awe-struck by the mystery of 
the world, that comprehends something — beyond 
eating and drinking — of how wonderiul and infinite 
a thing is this universal life, of which we are a part. 

A Man or Three Dollars. 

Now all this you cannot afford to give up for a 
little more of money, which after all is of value only 
as it helps you to gain this. A friend was telling me, 
the other day, of an old merchant who had become a 
millionaire. A gentleman called on him one day, 
and found him in overalls and an old soiled frock 
rolling a cask of sugar across the floor. He expostu- 
lated with him for spending his time that way, now 
that he was so rich. But the old man replied : '' Do 
you know you are not very wise to find fault with me 
for what I am doing } The fact of the matter is, you 
ought to know, that I don't know how to do anything 



134 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

else, and haven't any taste for anything else. I 've 
just made three dollars on this barrel of sugar, and 
you 'd take away from me the only pleasure that is 
left me that I can appreciate." The old man was 
right. Let him go on rolling his sugar barrel. But, 
after all, isn't it a pity that a man, a son of God, 
living under this wondrous dome of heaven, bright 
with sun, curtained with clouds, pillared by moun- 
tains, gemmed with stars that are only lamps along 
aver^ies leading to infinity, living on this old earth, 
with a rock-record of millions of past years right 
under his feet, whose surface is covered with ruins 
and monuments that whisper their wonder stories of 
buried civilizations, that is crowded with mystery and 
marvel, beautiful with trees, rivers and lakes that 
copy the upper heavens, living in the midst of men 
and women by whom is played an age-long comedy 
of laughter, or tragedy of tears with angels for spec- 
tators ; isn't it an infinite pity, I say, that a man so 
situated, should, for the sake of a little more money, 
have so stunted and warped and narrowed down his 
life that the only thing he could be interested in 
should be making three dollars on a barrel of sugar ? 

Young men start out in life with the purpose of 
getting rich with, always in mind, the after and 
superior purpose of happiness. But they forget to 
feed and sharpen the faculties and powers that can 
bring them into vital contact with the best things in 



WEALTH. 



135 



life ; and so at last they wake up to find they are like 
one who should work and save money to pay his 
entrance fee to a musical concert, but by the time it 
is saved discovers that he is deaf and cannot hear. 
Keep yourselves alive and fresh and open and young, 
and then if you get money, you will be capable of 
using it. 

Doing Good as you Go, 

Another thing I must hint. For the sake of saving 
do not sacrifice the pleasures and advantages of doing 
good as you go along. Thousands close their hands 
and pockets now, with the impression that when they 
get rich they shall find pleasure in doing good. But 
doing good is a faculty like any other that becomes 
weak, atrophied, palsied for lack of use. You might 
as well stop practising on the piano, under the 
impression that in a year or two, you '11 find time 
to give a whole month to it. In the meantime you 
will get out of practice and lose your power. Keep 
your hand and your pocket open or they will grow 
together so that nothing, short of death's finger, can 
unloose them ; and that will be that loose-fingered 
heirs may scatter the treasures you coined your 
heart and life to heap. 

Get Money, bnt — 

In conclusion then, you may rightly try to accu- 



^36 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

mulate money ; only remember it is accursed if you do 
it at the price of the weh'are or rights of others, or of 
your own higher self. It is turning life topsy-turvy 
to sacrifice the end to the means. 

But when a man has accumulated, let him ever be 
mindful that he has no right to hold it selfishly for 
his own amusement. He has nothing that has not 
been given him. His health, his brain, his special 
capacity, these he has inherited, they are a gift of 
humanity. The conditions of the world, social, politi- 
cal, commercial, that have enabled him to accumulate, 
these are a gift of humanity. All he has, then, he 
owes ; and the sacred duty is on him to use for the 
good of man. Make of your money a golden lever, 
with which, as best you can, to lift the world. 

Rank of Money-Maker. 

And remember, also, not to develop an over-ween- 
ing pride in your power as a money-maker. It is a 
legitimate power and an important one. But many a 
man who has no faculty for making money, may yet 
possess a power of another kind quite as manly and 
still more beneficent. He who can make the world 
think, love and live nobly ; such an one, though no 
money-maker or money-keeper, may still be one that 
the money-maker should be glad to hold up, while he 
does a higher and nobler work. By helping on such 



WEALTH. ify 



men as these, you may become partakers with them 
of their service, and the glory of their achievements. 
And even though one be only able to build a 
simple home, and lead a quiet, simple life — if it be 
pure, and thoughtful, and loving, and intelligent — 
remember that this is the best thing earth has for us 
after all. Tha-t manhood is first. If money helps it, 
blessed be money. But if the money be absent and 
the manhood be there, then the money may best be 
spared, for — 

" A man 's a man for a' that." 



HOW HIGH IS THE RANK OF LOVE? 



All Saved if Love be not Lost. 

Let us picture to ourselves a grand ship at sea, 
with all sails set, speeding happily and beautifully 
before the wind. Her captain, in his old age, has 
risked in her the accumulations of a life time. He 
has, beside, only his little child, the image and re- 
minder of her who has faded out of his arms and 
become a visitor only in his dreams. He is returning 
from a foreign country to his own home. This is 
the last voyage of his life. A storm comes up, the 
rudder is broken, and the ship blown upon the break- 
ers ; everything is going to pieces, his life work 
wrecked before his eyes. The boats are lowered, and 
swamped in the sea. But the captain, forgetting 
everything else, clasps the little fair-haired girl, which 
to him is more than ship, cargo, life, and all, in his 
arms, and flings himself into the sea, and after 
battling with the waves, at last drifts upon the sand, 
battered and bruised, but still clinging to his little 



LOVE. 



39 



child, from whom all 4ife seems to have departed. 
But using all the restoratives which his skill and 
experience can suggest, at last she breathes and 
opens her eyes again ; and although everything else 
has gone, do you not believe that the old man would 
clasp the little child to his heart, with thanksgiving 
to God, feeling that everything was saved, since she 
could look into his eyes once more ? 

T/ie World-voyage. 

I sometimes think of this old earth as a ship, with 
its passengers, out sailing across an infinite deep. 
The word planet, as perhaps you are aware, means 
simply a wanderer ; because to the eyes of the first 
astronomers, while the stars seemed to keep their 
places, the planets wandered back and forth across 
the face of heaven. The earth, then, is a ship sailing 
across the deep of the upper sky, from what port we 
know not, to what port we can only conjecture. But 
we find reason to believe that there is wisdom and 
love at the helm ; and if indeed God has made us in 
his own image, if love in us is the reflection of his 
love, then we must believe that God, as he looks over 
the universe, cares comparatively little for the hulks 
of planets and worlds, cares very little for mountains, 
for continents, for oceans, for clouds, for skies, but 
cares most of all for the love of childish human hearts, 



140 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

that look up to him and give thanks, however feeble 
and poor the expression. And we must believe that 
though the earth were wrecked, though it should 
burst out with flame some day — astronomers say it 
is possible — and though all should be on fire, and 
the rising flames should eat up the clouds and the 
atmosphere, and even seem to lick the stars from the 
surface of heaven, and there only be left ashes falling 
in silence in silent space, still, man — his child — and 
the love of the human heart would be the one thing 
that all the universe was for ; and if these be saved, 
God himself would count the universe no loss. For 
love is the one thing for which the universe exists, for 
which worlds exist, for which stars shine and planets 
circle about them. Love and the happiness which 
comes from love, is the end, the object, the crown of 
life. This is my theme, my proposition, which I 
propose to go on and illustrate. 

All for Love. 

I have talked to you a great deal, first and last, 
about thought, about study, about reading, about 
science, about laws, about all these things which 
make up the external part of life. And yet I have 
had it in my mind always, and I wish you would bear 
it in your mind always, that all these things are for 
love, these only mean love, the end and crown of all; 



LOVE. 



141 



these are of worth only as they minister to and nourish 
love. If you trace back this old earth toward the fire 
mist, millions and millions of years ago, and follow 
the course of this whirling cloud of nebulae, fling- 
ing off ring after ring, to become planets, to circle 
around that, which, in after ages, shall become the 
centre ; trace it all down through, it has no interest 
for us, it could by no possibility have any interest 
for us, unless we knew that we were starting at 
the fountain head of a stream that was to bear us 
on to a land that was to be the abode of sentient 
creatures that could feel and could love; that is the 
end and the only justification of it all. The laws of 
chemical attraction, those marvellous laws of crystal- 
lization, that create all the beautiful forms of the 
inorganic world beneath us, are of interest to us only 
because they are leading the world toward, and are 
the prophecy of, the beginning of an organization 
that in some degree can feel. 

T/ie Bird's Nest. 

And, forgetting for a moment that man is the 
highest creature on earth, let us raise the question 
as to what is the highest form of life beneath us, that 
is, that which comes nearest to the heart of man ? 
Trace all the way up from the beginning of feeling, 
the least possibility of a sensation, to that which 



142 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

comes nearest to us ; that which lives forever in the 
world's heart of song, of poetry, of romance, of child- 
memory, of old age, is so simple a thing as a bird's 
nest. It is sung by all the poets. I remember just 
now two or three beautiful lines of Shelley. He has 
personified the earth, and represents her as a figure 
dancing about the sun. Making his cloud speak, he 
says : 

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 

The sweet birds, every one. 
When rocked to rest on their Mother's breast, 

As she dances about the sun. 

And you remember those beautiful lines of Mr. 
Lowell's. In that wonderful picture of Spring, he 

says: 

The little bird sits at his door in the sun, 
Atilt, like a blossom among the leaves. 
And lets his illumined being o'errun 
With the deluge of summer it receives. 
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, 
And the dumb heart within her flutters and sings. 
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest ; 
In the nice ear of nature, which song is the best ? 

A bird's nest at the door of our childhood home is 
the one thing, it seems to me, that represents that 
which is most beautiful, most poetic, most touching, 
most meaning in all the lower life of the world. And 
why have I spoken of it and pictured it thus to-day } 
Because, until you reach the level of human hearts, 
the highest, finest, and most beautiful expression of 



LOVE. 143 

life, and that which comes closest to the human 
heart, that which represents that which is central in 
human life, the father care, the mother brooding love, 
the watchfulness of the feeble callow young, the 
training, the tenderness in their first efforts to fly, all 
this comes so near to what we mean by the word 
home, that we substitute the one word for the other ; 
and the young man, poetically, beautifully, talks of 
building a nest for his love, when to speak prosaically 
he expresses the purpose of building himself a house 
and making it a home. Come now then to human 
life and see how true this is, a principle all pervasive 
and central in human thous^ht and endeavor. 

Love in Lite7\iture. 

If you wish to get a permanent, age-long expres- 
sion of what men think, and hope, and fear, and feel, 
I have already told you that you must look at what 
the world calls its literature. Let us glance over a 
few specimens of that, and see the position that love 
occupies in the literature of the world. Go back 
first to old Homer ; take up his Iliad, and you find 
that the main-spring and motive of it is love. Love 
is its brightness ; and love thwarted, perverted and 
depraved, is the power that works its desolation ; and 
it is the flame of love, at last, that wraps in ruin the 
towers of the city of Ilium itself. And the most 



144 L^FE QUESTIONS. 

beautiful picture, perhaps, in all ancient literature, is 
the picture of the old warrior, Hector, who with- 
draws from the fight, and goes into the city for a 
moment's release, and seeks for his wife and his little 
boy. The child is afraid, and shrinks and cries at 
the sight of the black horse -hair plume upon his 
helmet ; and then stooping to the tenderness of his 
little boy, he takes his helmet off, lays it aside, and 
then the little boy comes jumping and laughing to 
his arms, and he tosses him, plays with him a 
moment, gives him back to his mother, puts his 
helmet on again, and goes back to the field. Love 
is the centre of it all. 

Take the Odyssey : the central figure there is the 
faithful wife Penelope, ever true and loyal, while her 
husband wanders, driven by the winds and by fate 
all over the world for ten long years, seeking her 
who has been faithful to him for a generation. Come 
down from that time to Petrarch. The central thought 
of Petrarch's work is love. Take Dante : from the 
lowest hell up through purgatory into heaven, until 
the red passion of human love, purified, flames into 
the white heat of the divine — everywhere, the one 
word that binds it together and gives it meaning is 
this central word of the world's heart, love. Come 
down to the days of Shakspeare : all the grand 
pictures of comedy and tragedy, the personages that 
he has created are only beings that love and hate ; 



LOVE. 



45 



and their glory or gloom are only the brightness or 
shadows of human love. And so the novels of the 
world. When you think over those that you have 
read, what is it that comes to mind .•* It is Little 
Nell and her grandfather wandering on a country 
road, or sitting down to rest under a tree. It is this 
word picture of some type of human affection, which 
is the meaning of it all. It is no accident that you 
always expect to find hero and heroine, to find the 
meaning of any great book of the world turning on 
the relationship in which we stand to each other. 
This is the single pivot in human life, and all things 
in heaven and earth revolve around it of necessity — 
always have, do now, and always will, until human 
nature is radically changed. Mr. William Morris, 
the English poet, has written a book entitled " Love 
is Enough." In it he represents a great king leaving 
his throne and his dominions, and travelling over the 
world^ in search of a perfect love somewhere ; and 
when he has found it, he cares no more for his 
dominions or his power, but feels that love is enough 
to fill the meaning, to round out the beauty and be 
the glory of life. But even if we are not ready to 
concede that, you will perforce, if you study the 
history of the world, concede this other point, that 
all things else, without love, are not enough. Take 
the picture of such a life as Dean Swift's, the might- 
iest man of his time, an intellectual emperor of 

10 



146 I-IFE QUESTIONS. 

thought, and yet a man whose intimate friend said 
was the most unhappy man on the face of the earth. 
And they who know the one secret of his life, know 
that it was simply because of a disappointed hunger 
of a life for a love that was never satisfied. Take 
such a character as Queen Elizabeth, the most con- 
spicuous figure in Europe during her mighty, her 
long, her successful reign. She studied the interests 
of the country, planning between conflicting parties. 
Catholic and Protestant. She was wise enough to 
know that if she cast in her lot definitely with either 
the one or the other, by marrying a Catholic or Prot- 
estant, she would shatter the kingdom into atoms. 
Going through life such a grand queen, she was yet 
heart -hungry and miserable, carrying to her grave 
the one sorrow and regret of her reign, that she was 
so situated she could not marry a subject whom she 
loved. Robert Browning, in one of his beautiful 
poems, entitled *' In a Balcony," has represented a 
queen occupying precisely this position. Sitting on 
a pedestal, worshipped and feared on the part of all 
her subjects, and yet finding no human love ; hunger- 
ing for heart-satisfaction, so that she could say that 
if one of her halberdiers, who bows in awe and fear 
before her as she passed, would only fling aside his 
weapon and clasp her feet, she would thank him for 
very love ; because she desired that something should 
come near to her and take away this terrible icy isola- 
tion and lonely grandeur. 



LOVE. 



147 



Love is Life. 

And so if you look through the world, what will 
you find ? You will find, perhaps, an old man encased 
in his outer crust of hardness apparently, so that you 
would say there is not a tender fibre in his being ; 
and yet if you know him through and through, per- 
haps you will find — I believe that you will always 
find — that the main-spring of his activity is the love 
for some one living or a memory of one that is dead. 
A young man is conscious that he lives for love. A 
middle-aged man, however calm and cool in his exte- 
rior he may have become, is conscious that the one 
main, strong and motive force of his life is love. 
Then hate itself is only love turned sour. Even the 
miser's affection for his gold is only love, disappointed 
in its main outlook, and turning to something else to 
feed its insatiable hunger. 

Sentiment and Sentimentality. 

There is a vast difference between what we call sen- 
timent and sentimentality. Sentimentality is weak- 
ness ; it is folly ; it is love spoiled. But sentiment is 
the deepest and grandest part of human life, that 
without which all other forces become weakness and 
turn to nothing. You may compare sentimentality, 



48 LIFE QUESTIONS. 



if you will, to steam in an engine as it stands in a 
depot — escaping, hissing, puffing — enveloping both 
engine and the people, and the whole building in its 
vapor ; making a great display of itself, but doing 
nothing. Sentiment is the same steam quiet, not a 
particle escaping, drawing a ponderous long train of 
cars. The sentimentality that we despise, that we 
sneer at, that we laugh at, is only the effervescence, 
the useless and foolish escape of that which, prisoned 
in the heart, becomes the year-long motive power of 
love, of self-denial, of sacrifice, of patient endeavor, of 
noble consecration. There are men and women who 
seem to live without love, who go through life alone, 
but it is only seeming. They do not tell the secrets 
of the years that are gone, the little romance of the 
past, that finds its only expression perhaps, in a with- 
ered flower between the leaves of a book, or in a lock 
of hair. And many and many a time these men or 
these women, old bachelor and old maid, if you choose 
to give them those names, have no human love that 
is apparent to-day, for the reason that the shining of 
that old memory is so much brighter to them than 
any living human form or features, that it casts them 
all into eclipse ; and they are secretly true to the 
image of beauty and glory that they carry in their 
inmost hearts. And the tongue that can speak a 
flippant or unkind word of such as these ought to be 
withered at its root. 



LOVE. 149 



High- Water Mark of the World. 

What is it that represents the high tide of civiliza- 
tion ? What is it that represents the utmost achieve- 
ment of the world to-day ? Did you ever ask your- 
selves the question ? It is not standing armies and 
arsenals ; it is not capitol buildings, parliament houses, 
palaces, and city halls ; it is not our magnificent mod- 
ern dwellings ; it is not our courts of law and justice ; 
it is not our school-houses ; it is not our docks, our 
shipping and our commerce that circles the globe. 
If there should come to this planet some dweller of 
a heavenly orb, with a definite understanding of the 
condition and history of human life, wishing to find 
out what is the finest and noblest thing that the earth 
has produced, he would look for none of these things. 
He would look to find the quality of our human homes. 
The mother and her child worshipped in ancient Egypt 
three thousand years before Moses, just as she is wor- 
shipped in Catholicism to-day : the mother and her 
child, the mother true, and pure, and sweet, and lov- 
ing, and cultivated, and educated, is the highest, finest 
outcome of the world ; and with the child in her arms, 
they represent the highest results of the world's civ- 
ilization ; and everything else on the face of the earth 
simply stands for and serves that. For the sake of 
the mother and her child, armies are organized and 



150 LIFE QUESTIONS. 

battles are fought ; for the sake of the mother and 
her child, ships are trading around the world ; for the 
sake of the mother and her child, courts of justice 
are organized and police parade and guard the safety 
and peace of our cities ; for the sake of the mother 
and her child, school-houses, colleges and universities 
are erected ; for the sake of the mother and her child 
are stores, banks and offices built ; for the sake of the 
mother and her child, men dig deep for treasures in 
the bowels of the earth. There is no activity on 
earth that does not exist for them, and that does 
not from afar, from the heavens above or the depths 
of the earth beneath, seek all its treasures, simply 
that it may lay them at her feet, simply that they 
may minister to her adornment, to her culture, to her 
happiness, to her beauty, to her peace, and to the train- 
ing of the little child. This is the end of all living. 
The century plant, you know, grows for a hundred 
years, gathering sustenance from the earth, from the 
rain, from the air, from the sunlight, one hundred 
years of endeavor, one hundred years of accumula- 
tion, only, that at the last, it may blossom out into 
one perfect flower. This universe of ours, from the 
fire-mists of millions of years agone, has existed only 
that at the last, not the century plant, but the millen- 
nium plant may blossom at last into the perfect flower 
of a perfect mother and a perfect child, the highest 
object and expression of human, life. For this and 



LOVE. 



151 



this alone, do all things exist, and towards this do all 
things tend. 

Love and Patriotism. 

And what is patriotism ? To leave this central 
idea of the outcome and centre of society, and come 
out towards the world of affairs, what is patriotism, 
and what does it mean ? You remember those fa- 
miliar words of Scott : 

Breathes there a man with soul so dead. 
Who never to himself hath said, 
This is my own, my native land ! 
Whose heart within him hath not burned. 
As home his footsteps he hath turned, 
From wandering on a foreign strand ? 

And you remember those other familiar words — 
but perhaps, you^ave never noticed what it is that is 
central in them — those words that so fire the human 
heart : 

Strike ! till the last armed foe expires ; 
Strike ! for your altars and your fires; 
Strike ! for the green graves of your sires ; 
God, and your native land ! 

In all these the central thought is simply love. 
Altars, fires, graves, merely outward symbols and 
manifestations of this central, all absorbing passion 
of humanity. Patriotism simply means the senti- 
ment of love, nothing else. Take the soldiers that 
followed through, or died in the war. We some- 



1^2 I^IF^ QUESTIONS. 

times used to argue that this country was predestined 
to be one. The Mississippi river, we said, ran 
through it from north to south, linking it together. 
By virtue of the very configuration of its valleys, its 
mountain chains, and its river bottoms, it was des- 
tined, we said, to be one. But do you think anybody 
ever went to war, during those four years, on account 
of a calculation like that.? Do you think anybody 
ever went to war because this country was the great 
granary, as we say, of the world, because it had such 
extensive forests, because it had such* mighty rivers, 
such boundless plains, and such things as we speak of 
in our Fourth of July orations.-* Do you suppose 
anybody ever went to war for these things ? The 
one thing that started them, and sustained them all 
through, was simply a sentiment : " This is my coun- 
try, and it has been insulted and threatened." Men 
calculated about it no more than they would calculate 
when they saw their mother insulted, as to whether 
they should spring to her defence. It was simply 
sentiment that led those banner-carriers of the war 
to take the key point of the battle, plant the flag in 
the soil, and stand, determined that it should either 
mark the place that they had won, or that it should 
be wrapped about them in their dying hour. Patri- 
otism is only a sentiment. 



LOVE. 



153 



Love and Morals. 

And so the whole wide field of the moral life of the 
world in all its departments. No man is truly moral 
who acts merely from a sense of duty or prudence. 
It has been well said, and very sharply, that though 
honesty is the best policy, yet no man is honest who 
is honest for that reason. Morality means not calcu- 
lation. No man is perfectly moral, perfectly saved in 
his own being, until he is so absorbed in love of that 
which is right, until the beauty of truth and right 
have captivated his soul, so that he would follow 
them wherever they might lead. Morality, in all its 
wide sweep, then, is simply a sentiment in its mighty 
power. 

Love and Religion. 

And now let us come to look for a moment at that 
still higher department of life which we call religion. 
There has been a wide controversy, during the past 
two or three years, over the question as to the domain 
which religion has a right to occupy. The theo- 
logian, speaking of religion as being the soul of 
society, has claimed that it has the right to occupy 
every intellectual department of the world. Mr. 
Tyndall has made himself famous in some directions, 
and infamous in others, because he has said that the 
only legitimate realm for religion to occupy is the 



154 -^^^^ QUESTIONS. 

realm of sentiment, the realm of feeling, the realm of 
emotion. But is not Mr. Tyndall right, when we 
analyze it carefully ? Can any man formulate God } 
It is the Bible, itself, that asks: "Canst thou by 
searching find out God.^" If you cannot find Him 
out, can you put Him into language .'* There never 
has been a creed, expression, or outline of divinity, 
since the world was made, that has not belittled, and 
dwarfed, and deformed God. And the vital thought 
of the world finds itself compelled to burst all these 
shackles, and think of God as the spirit of life at the 
heart, and breathing through the movement of all 
things. Religion is first and essentially that which 
the poets express when they talk about the relation 
in which we stand to the sum of things that make up 
the universe. Religion is itself the flow and ebb of 
sentiment; the kinship, the sympathy, the feeling of 
mystery with which men look upon the world about 
them. Byron gives this essential heart and idea of 
religion beautiful expression, in some of his verses 
of Childe Harold ; as when he says : 

Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part 
Of me and of my soul, as I of them ? 
Is not the love of these deep in my heart 
With a pure passion ? 

And again, 

I live not in myself, but I become 
Portion of that around me ; and to me 
High mountains are a feeling. 



LOVE. 



155 



And Wordsworth, in that beautiful passage where 
he speaks of — 

A sense of something far more deeply interfused, 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

And the round ocean, and the living air, 

And the blue skies, and in the heart of man : 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All living things, all objects of all thought, 

And rolls through all things. 

Here is religion for the heart, then ; it is a senti- 
ment that sees the face of God looking out of the 
sky ; that sees the order of God in the movement of 
the stars ; that sees the beauty of God in flowers ; 
that sees the love, the infinite life of God bursting up 
in the little tiny grass-blades over all the earth ; that 
looks beneath this superficial form of things. The 
man who has no sentiment, no religious feeling in 
him, is the one that Wordsworth speaks of when he 
says : 

A primrose by the river's brim, 
A simple primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more. 

But to one who can feel and think, it is like that 
other idea that Tennyson gives such fine expression 
to, when he holds that little flower, plucked from a 
cranny of the wall, and says : If he could compre- 
hend that he should know both God and man. 

Love and Law. 
This is the very substance, the central idea of the 



1^6 LIF^ QUESTIONS. 

divine life. We do not think of the law of the relig- 
ious life when love is perfect, any more than we 
think of the law when we look at the stars. We do 
not learn the laws of the heavenly bodies because we 
find out the something of power or force that compels, 
that controls, that makes the stars hang where they 
do, or swing in the orbits which they follow. We 
deduce our laws from the perfect expression of the 
order and life of the universe. And so if men loved 
completely we should forget all about law. There is 
not an evil on the face of the earth that would not be 
obliterated, blotted out at once, if only men intelli- 
gently, perfectly, completely loved. You would for- 
get that there ever was a law made. There would 
be no need of Congress, of laws, of armies, of battles. 
Men would be led in the beauty of the true life by 
the power of a living attraction. 

Love and Retrospect. 

What, then, is the sum and substance of it all .'* 
Take our own individual life. As we look back 
toward childhood — childhood means to us the love 
of our mother, father, sister, brother, playmate, com- 
panion, friend. When we say with Hood, 

I remember, I remember, 
The house where I was born — 

The house takes on its meaninof as hallowed with 



LOVE. 



157 



the beauty that rayed out of a loving mother's face. 
And when we grow to be young men, we look for- 
ward to life with the inspiration of love, the one 
grand thing being that we should search over all the 
world, if we can, to find the other self which shall be 
the completion of happiness to our being. And 
when we get to be gray-haired and grave men, in 
middle age or verging toward old age, we may not 
talk so much about love as we once did, but it is 
nothing but loves that remain, that make green, and 
bright, and beautiful the old age ; or it is the cher- 
ished memories of loves that are past, for which we 
would not take all the whole world could give if they 
must be sacrificed. And when at last the end comes, 
and we think of the death-bed, what is it we care for 
then .^ Do I not speak out the heart of you all when 
I say that the only thing I care for, as I look forward 
to that time, is that my pathway may still be encom- 
passed with love ; that when I can no more give 
utterance to my thoughts or feelings by speech, I 
may still feel the love of some one pressing my 
hand ; that the last look of earth may be into the 
eyes of some one who loves me ! 

Love and Prospect. 

And beyond, over there ! They talk a good deal, 
sometimes, about an impersonal immortality. They 



1^8 LIFE QUESTIONS, 

question whether we shall remember or know the 
friends that we have loved here. But I for one, am 
ready to say that I care for no impersonal immortal- 
ity ; it is words that mean nothing to me ; and I do 
not care for any heaven that does not mean a personal, 
tender, old-time love for those that have become a 
part and the very best part of my whole being. I do 
not care for heaven if it is to be purchased at the 
price of all those that have stood nearest. to me on 
earth. I would not take it as a gift ; it is only an 
empty husk with the kernel dropped out. If this 
personal love is to be missed, I had rather that the 
place where my body is buried should be visited by 
some one that loves me as long as love and memory 
remain, weeping now and then, a tear of regret, 
placing a flower upon my tomb, and then be forgot- 
ten when love and personal love is dead. But I 
believe something higher and better than that. I 
believe in a future life, and that love is the heart and 
beginning of it there as it is here. We shall not be 
ourselves if this is taken away. Love is able to make 
beautiful the desert, or a lonely world in another life ; 
but the absence of it would blacken and darken with 
rust' all the gold, make worthless all the precious 
stones, make lonely all the streets, blot out the very 
centre and meaning of heaven itself. One of the 
prettiest pictures in our modern literature is in a poem 
by Mr. Rosetti, where he represents a young wife 



LOVE. 159 



who died on her marriage day, waiting for twenty- 
long years in heaven ; watching every flight of spirits 
as they come from the earth to see if Ae is among 
them. And as year after year goes by, disappoint- 
ment follows disappointment, and she waits and waits, 
and he does not come ; at last she turns away in the 
glory and the beauty and weeps those old human 
earthly tears. We shall be the same, if there be a 
future, as we are now ; and love must abide or there 
will be no heaven. 



THE END. 



